The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Forty-One

I called Alafair’s cell phone again, and again it went straight to voicemail. I called Sean.

“Yo, Dave,” he said.

“What’s your twenty?”

“Just coming back from the airport. Couldn’t find anybody who knew anything positive. One guy said he thought he saw Cormier get on a private plane, but he wasn’t sure.”

“Lou Wexler rents a place in St. Martinville, but I don’t know where. He drives a cherry-red Lamborghini. Go to the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department and find out. We ROA there.”

“You can probably beat me there.”

“I’m picking up Clete Purcel.”

“What’s the deal on Wexler?”

“I don’t know. I missed something on him. Something Clete told me. Or maybe Alafair told me. I can’t remember.”

“Copy that,” he said. “Out.”

I got into my truck and drove past the Shadows, then swung over to St. Peter’s Street and headed for Clete’s motor court. On Sundays, Clete usually washed or waxed his convertible and barbecued a pork roast or a chicken on the grill under the oaks by the bayou. If the weather was warm, he wore his knee-length Everlast boxing trunks and LSU or Tulane or Raging Cajuns sweatshirt, his upper arms the circumference of a fully pressurized fire hose. With luck, his metabolism would be free of the toxins that had impaired much of his life.

This morning, however, none of the foresaid applied. He was walking up and down in front of his cottage, cell phone to his ear, wearing a Hawaiian shirt outside his slacks; his shoes were shined, his hair wet-combed. He looked thinner, twenty years younger, wired to the eyes. I stopped the truck and got out, the engine still running. “What’s going on?”

“I was just calling you. Where’s Alafair?”

“Maybe with Lou Wexler.”

He looked into space, then back at me. “Wexler?”

“Yes.”

“I thought maybe—”

“What?”

“I’m confused. I saw Cormier drive by early this morning.”

“Are you sure?”

“How many guys around here have an expression like a skillet and look carved out of rock? I thought maybe he went to your house.”

I rarely saw fear in the face of Clete Purcel. He pinched his mouth.

“What is it?” I said.

“I just got a call from Alafair.”

“You talked to her?”

“No. There was just a little hiccup of a voice, like she’d butt-dialed and was talking to somebody else and clicked off again. At least, that’s what I thought I was hearing.”

“You’re not making sense, Cletus.”

“I think maybe she was saying ‘Help.’ ”

I felt a hole open in the bottom of my stomach. “Was Desmond driving a Lamborghini?”

“No, he was in a Humvee, same one he was driving at the res.”

“The lady who lives in the old Burke home saw a cherry-red Lamborghini stop at my house.”

“It was Wexler?”

“There’s no other Lamborghini around here. Just a minute.” I called Helen at home. No one answered. I called Bailey Ribbons. “I think either Lou Wexler or Desmond Cormier has got his hands on Alafair,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “Des is probably in Arizona now.”

“He’s not. Clete saw him a short while ago.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“It’s not difficult. Desmond Cormier is a liar.”

“You don’t have to talk that way,” she said.

I hung up.

“What do you want to do?” Clete said.

“We’re supposed to ROA with Sean McClain in St. Martinville.”

“I need my piece.”

“Get it,” I said.

“What have you got in the truck?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

We drove up the two-lane toward St. Martinville, through the tunnel of oaks on the north side of New Iberia. Perhaps it was the season or perhaps not, but the light was wrong. It was brittle, flickering, harsh on the eyes, suggestive of a cruel presence in the natural world. We passed the two-story frame house with a faux-pillared gallery that had been built by a free man of color before the War Between the States. According to legend, he had worn elegant clothes and spoken Parisian French and had his land and wealth stolen from him by carpetbaggers after the war. To this day, no one has ever succeeded in painting the building a brilliant white: within a short time, the paint is quickly dulled by dust from the cane fields or smoke from stubble fires, as though the structure itself bears the legacy of a man who betrayed his race and sought to become what he was not at the expense of his brethren and ultimately himself.

As I stared through the windshield, the two-lane unspooling before me, I knew something was terribly wrong in the external structure of the day, in the rules that supposedly govern mortality and the laws of physics. Dust devils were churning inside the uncut cane, troweling rooster tails seventy feet into the air, although the temperature was dropping and the wind was cold enough to dry and crack the skin. By the side of the road was a watermelon and strawberry stand with wooden tables under a live oak hung with Spanish moss. There had not been a fruit stand on that road for decades; plus, we never saw melons and strawberries after August, unless they were imported and on sale at an expensive grocery in Lafayette.

Then I saw two middle-aged people holding hands by the roadside. The man was huge and wore strap overalls and a tin hard hat slanted on his head. He grinned and gave me the thumbs-up sign. The woman wore a wash-faded print dress and a red hibiscus flower in her hair; she was also smiling, like someone welcoming a visitor at an entryway.

The man and woman were my mother and father. Behind them, I saw Smiley Wimple with two little girls dressed in white and hung with chains of flowers. The wound in Smiley’s side glowed with an eye-watering radiance.

My truck shot past them, blowing newspaper and dust all over the road.

“Watch where you’re going!” Clete said.

“You saw that?” I said.

“Saw what?”

I looked in the rearview mirror. The newspaper had settled on the asphalt. There was nothing on either side of the highway except pastureland and cane fields. “Did you see those people?”

“What people?”

“Don’t shine me on,” I said.

“I didn’t see anything. What the hell are you talking about?”

I stared at him, then had to correct the wheel to keep from going off the shoulder. “I’m not going to jack you around. I just saw my parents. I saw Smiley, too. With two little girls.”

“Pull over.”

“No.”

“This isn’t Nam, Streak. You roger that, noble mon? We got no medevac. In the next fifteen minutes we may have to kick some serious ass. You stop talking bullshit.”

“I know what I saw. Don’t give me a bad time about it either.”

“Okay,” he replied. “Okay. We can’t blow it. These guys are going to kill Alafair.”

“Guys?”

“The sick fucks are working together.”

“For what purpose?”

“It’s about the jail. It’s a war on this whole fucking area.” He looked straight ahead, rigid in the seat, his fists clenched like small hams on his knees, his face as tight as latex stretched on his skull, his chest rising and falling.

“You’re losing it, Clete.”

“This from the guy who just saw his dead parents?”

His right hand was twitching on his thigh.

You know how death is. It can be a strange companion. Its smell is like no other in the world. I remember an ARVN graves unit digging up the bodies of villagers who had been buried alive along a streambed deep in the heart of Indian country. The stench broke through the soil and reminded me of the whores pouring their waste buckets into the privies behind the cribs on Railroad Avenue, back when I threw the newspaper in New Iberia’s old red-light district. The putrescence of the odor, however, doesn’t compare to the image of the flesh when it’s exposed by a shovel. It’s marbled with whitish-yellow boils and fissures in the skin that look like centipedes, and the eyes resemble fish scale and are either half-lidded or as bulging and black and white as an eight ball.

If a person is interested in the kind of war scene my patrol stumbled upon, I can add a few details to satisfy his curiosity. If our hypothetical observer had been there, he would have seen the bodies being rolled into tarps, and the hands of the dead that were little more than bones held together by a hank of skin; he would have also noticed that the fingernails were broken and impacted with dirt; that night our observer would have had a very stiff drink and tried to convince himself that Dachau and Nanking were a historical perversion and not a manifestation of the worm that lives in the human unconscious.

These are certainly not good images to reflect upon, but I like to offer them for the purview of those who love wars as long as they don’t have to participate in one. That said, the ubiquity of the worm does not manifest itself only on battlefields. It can take on an invisibility that is more insidious than the footage I can never rinse from my dreams. You don’t smell it or see it, but in your sleep, you see it grow in size and nestle on your chest and squeeze the air from your lungs. You spend the rest of the night with the light on or a drink in your hand or your hand clasped on a holy medal, and you pray on your knees for the dawn to come. After the sun breaks on the horizon, you may see figures standing in the shade of a building, or in an alleyway, or among wind-thrashed trees, and you’ll quickly realize the bell you hear tolling in the distance is one that no one else can either hear or see.

That’s when you know you’ve taken up residence in a very special place you cannot tell others about, lest you frighten them or embarrass yourself. You’ve seen the great reality and have accepted it for what it is, and in so doing, you have been set free. But by anyone’s measure, the dues you pay are not for everyone. Psychiatrists call it a Garden of Gethsemane experience. It’s a motherfucker, and you never want to have it twice.

I’m saying I no longer worry about death, at least my own. But the thought of losing my daughter was more than I could bear. There is no human experience worse than losing one’s child, and to lose a child at the hands of evil men causes a level of emotional pain that has no peer. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. That is why I never argue with those who want to see the murderers of their children receive the ultimate penalty, although I do not believe in capital punishment.

We crossed the St. Martinville city limits and rode through the black district, past Bella Delahoussaye’s cottage, and stopped in front of the sheriff’s department. Sean McClain was standing outside his cruiser, waiting for us.

I parked and got out of the truck. “What do you have?”

“Wexler’s address up the bayou,” he replied. “A deputy said he saw the Lamborghini go through the square early this morning. He remembered it because it was in his brother-in-law’s repair shop for a couple of days.”

“That’s why Wexler was driving Butterworth’s Subaru in the park,” I said. “Is there a deputy sitting on Wexler’s place?”

“I told them not to do nothing till you got here.”

“Give me the address. Follow us but stay a block behind.”

“What about the St. Martin deputies?” Sean said.

I shook my head.

“Is that smart?” he said.

I looked at him without speaking.

“It’s your show,” he said.

We pulled into a shady lot on the Teche, just outside the city limits. The house was a large, weathered gingerbread affair, the wide, railed gallery overgrown with banana fronds, the rain gutters full of leaves and moss, the tin roof streaked with rust. The chimney was cracked, a broken lightning rod hanging from the bricks. There were no vehicles in the yard or garage. I got out and banged on the door, then circled the house. My caution about the St. Martin Parish authorities was unnecessary; no one was home. I splintered the front door out the jamb and went inside.

Every room was immaculate and squared away. I began pulling clothes off hangers and raking shelves onto the floor.

“What are you doing?” Clete said.

“Finding whatever I can.”

“We don’t know that Wexler has Alafair. Cormier is out there somewhere.”

“It’s Wexler. She was here. I can feel it.”

Clete looked at me strangely.

“It’s something a father knows,” I said.

Sean McClain was still outside. Through the open front door, I saw Bailey Ribbons pull into the lot in a cruiser. She got out and walked into the living room. “Helen says we’ll have the whole department on this, Dave. What do you have so far?”

“We found out from a St. Martin deputy that Wexler’s Lamborghini was in the shop. He’d probably borrowed Butterworth’s Subaru when Wimple accosted him.”

“You dumped his closets and shelves?” she said.

“I’m just getting started.”

“Maybe dial it down a little bit? We don’t want to lose something in the shuffle.”

She was right. I was in overdrive. “Check the kitchen. I’m going in the attic.”

I pulled down the drop door in the bedroom ceiling and climbed up the steps. I shone a penlight around the attic walls. A heavy trunk, a wardrobe box, and a handwoven basket-like baby carriage were in one corner. The wardrobe box was stuffed with historical costumes that smelled of mothballs. The baby carriage was filled with bandanas, women’s shoes, empty purses and wallets, and old Polaroids of third-world women in bars and cafés. All the women were smiling. The trunk was unlocked. I lifted the top. It was packed with video games, the kind that award the shooters or drivers points for the victims they rack up.

I dumped the trunk and wardrobe box, then the baby carriage. As the purses and wallets and women’s clothing and photos spilled on the floor, I saw the one object I did not want to find, one that sucked the air from my chest.

I picked it out of the pile and went down the ladder and eased the drop door back into the ceiling, then went into the kitchen. Bailey was sitting at the table. “What is it?”

I set the box on the table. “The tarot.”

“Shit,” Clete said behind me.

I sat down and put the deck in Bailey’s hand. “See if there’s anything significant about the deck. Missing cards or whatever.”

She began separating the suits, then stopped and set one card aside. It was a card called the Empress. It was also disfigured. She resumed sorting the deck and put four other cards with the Empress. “The Queen of Cups, the Queen of Pentacles, the Hanged Man, the Ten of Wands, the Empress, the Ace of Wands, and the Fool all have X’s cut on them,” she said. “The Queen of Cups is Bella Delahoussaye. The Queen of Pentacles is Hilary Bienville. The Hanged Man and the Ten of Wands could be Joe Molinari. The Fool might be Antoine Butterworth. The Empress is Lucinda Arceneaux. The Ace of Swords is for sure Axel Devereaux.”

“You’re sure about this?” Clete said.

“No,” she replied. “That’s all guesswork.”

“Why is Lucinda Arceneaux the Empress and not Hilary or Bella?” I said.

“The Empress is the earth mother, the patroness of charity and kindness.”

“Why are you so certain about the Ace of Swords for Axel Devereaux?” I said.

“The Ace of Swords means raw power,” she said. “In reverse, it can mean loss and hatred and self-destruction. Devereaux had a baton shoved down his throat. The killer put a fool’s cap on him to ridicule him in death.”

“Why two cards for Molinari?” I said.

“Good question. My guess is Wexler thinks of him as both a sacrificial and a mediocre personality. Molinari was related to one of the guards in the jail?”

“Yes,” I said. But she already knew that. She was holding something back; I was afraid to find out what.

“The High Priestess is missing from the deck,” she said.

“What’s the High Priestess?” I said.

“She sits at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple. She holds the Book of Wisdom in her hand and is identified with purity and intellectualism.”

I felt my heart slowing, as though it no longer had the power to pump blood. “You think the High Priestess is Alafair?”

Bailey visibly tried not to swallow. “Who else would it be? Maybe he saved her out. There’s something else I want you to see.”

I coughed into my hand. “What?”

“This.” The letters B and S had been scratched into the table’s surface. “They’re fresh, maybe cut with a fork. They mean anything to you other than ‘bullshit’?”

I was having trouble breathing. “They’re a message to me from Alafair. I think they stand for ‘Baby Squanto.’ ”

I went outside and across the gallery and out into the yard. The sky was an unnatural blue, shiny, hard to look at. Bailey followed me. “Everything we’re doing now is based on speculation,” she said.

“I think everything you said is correct,” I said. “Don’t try to put a good hat on it.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “The guy we’re dealing with is a ritualist. What looks crazy to us makes complete sense to him. He’s going to come back to the place he started. The challenge is to put yourself in the head of a lunatic.”

“Say that again?”

“Ritualists often seek symmetry. People with severe psychological disorders have trouble drawing a tree or making a circle. Our guy will try to come full circle.”

“With the cross out on the water?” I said.

“Or something like it.”

“Do you have any idea how many square miles of water you’re talking about?” I said.

“That’s about as good as it gets, Dave,” she replied. “I’m sorry to say all these things. Maybe I’m dead wrong.”

I looked back at the house. The sun was higher in the sky. The shadows had dropped down into the trees. The house looked cold and empty and drab in the bright light.

“It all seems too easy,” I said.

“What does?” she said.

“The baby carriage filled with trophies from his crimes. The boxed cards with X’s cut on them.”

“He’s a trophy killer,” she said.

Clete was talking to Sean by the gallery while Sean stared at his feet as though being berated. Clete walked toward me. “Can you give us a minute, Miss Bailey?” he said.

“No, I cannot,” she said. “Where do you get off with that attitude?”

“I was just wondering about McClain,” he said.

“What about him?” she said.

“He told me he might be going out to Hollywood. That Cormier might be casting him.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “He’s a kid.”

“I thought he was North Lousiana’s answer to the Lone Ranger,” Clete said.

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

“That he shouldn’t be palling around with a guy who might be aiding and abetting a murderer,” Clete said.

I stared at Sean in the sunlight. He wore a department hat that made his face look gray and dusty under the brim, as if he had been working all day in a field. He tried to smile at me, but his lip seemed to catch on a bottom tooth.

“You sure that kid’s not hinky?” Clete said.

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Lou Wexler.