The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Forty-Two

“I’m glad I caught you,” he said.

My hand was trembling on the phone. “Where are you, Mr. Wexler?”

“Trying to find Alafair. Lose the formality. We’re on the same side.”

“Alafair is not with you?”

“Desmond has her. Stop listening to that man’s lies.”

“We’re at your house in St. Martinville. I saw the tarot. I saw your trophies in the attic.”

“What trophies?”

“The wallets and purses and shoes and bandanas.”

“Those are props from a film we made about a serial killer.” He gave me the title and named the actors and the directors. My head was throbbing. I couldn’t process his words.

“I don’t know anything about a tarot,” he went on. “If you found it in my house, Des put it there. He’s been salting the mineshaft. Isn’t that the term for it?”

“How do you account for the shooting in City Park?”

“You’ve got me on that one. My Lamborghini was in the shop, so I borrowed Antoine’s Subaru. I was having a go of it with a local lady when this nasty little sod walked up on me and tried to put out my wick. So I clicked off his switch. I shouldn’t have run. I was going to turn myself in today. I have an attorney. You can check out my story.”

“Tell me where you are.”

“I’m not quite sure about my safety at this point.”

“You think we’re going to kill you in custody?”

“I’ve seen the way you and your Falstaffian friend do business, sir. The other problem is I don’t think you have a bloody clue what’s been going on in your own life.”

“Repeat that?”

“I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but your homicide partner is not what she seems. She set fire to a school as a child, and she fried some fellows at a fairgrounds up in Montana.”

“How do you know this?”

“I knew her in New Orleans. I was sticking it to her long before you did. Sorry to tell you, she’s not Clementine Carter, as Des is always saying. What a fucking joke. I’ll be back with you later. Or maybe not.”

He broke the connection. I folded the phone in my hand and tried to keep my face empty.

“That was Wexler?” Bailey said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“What did he say?”

“That except for shooting Wimple, he’s an innocent man.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Did you know him in New Orleans?”

“No.”

“Never saw him before you came to the Iberia Sheriff’s Department.”

“No. Is that what he told you?”

“We need to get a net over Desmond Cormier,” I said.

“Cormier has Alafair?”

“I’m not sure about anything.”

She looked at me in dismay. I walked toward my truck. I have long had problems with vertigo, the kind caused by a tightening of blood vessels in the brain. I could feel the ground caving under my feet. Then I felt Clete fitting his hand inside my upper arm. He opened the driver’s door and steadied me so I could step inside.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“What did that cocksucker say?”

“He knows things about Bailey that would be impossible for him to know, unless he’d had a relationship with her. He says the stuff from the attic are movie props. He knows nothing about a tarot deck.”

“What else?”

“Alafair may already be dead. Or maybe Cormier has her. I just don’t know.”

“Don’t say that about her being dead. You hear me, Streak? Don’t even think it. I’m going to get these guys. I promise you.”

He looked like he was drowning.

Bailey and our departmental pilot and I took the pontoon plane over the wetlands south of New Iberia. It might have seemed a waste of time to others, but we had nothing else to go on. I had no idea where Desmond Cormier might be. Wexler knew Bailey’s history, which gave plausibility to the other things he’d said. Possibly he had worked as a companion killer with Desmond. That I’ve spoken of Desmond’s physiognomy several times probably says more about me than Desmond. The prenatal alcoholic influence stamped on his features was undeniable, the inner reality one I had never wanted to accept.

As the plane dipped and turned and glided over the swamps and marshlands that were shrinking daily, I wondered what to look for. Maybe a white cabin cruiser couched in a green harbor. A cherry-red Lamborghini. A houseboat or a duck camp where Alafair had set a fire as a mayday signal. These thoughts were the product of desperation, and they led me to worse thoughts, namely, that I might see Alafair costumed and floating out to sea, closing the circle for the killer, as Bailey had predicted.

I had thought my days in the Garden of Gethsemane were over and my ticket had been punched, and that I belonged to the club of those who were inured to the worst the world could offer. But as I looked at the miles and miles of salt grass and flooded gum trees and milky-green curtains of algae that floated atop the bays, I knew that I was powerless over my situation, and the last remnant of my family had perhaps been subsumed by the evil forces I have fought against all my life, most of it in vain.

What does the expression “hell on earth” mean? In my experience, it usually has to do with our own handiwork. Freight cars clicking down the tracks on their way to Buchenwald. A nineteen-year-old peasant girl set alight while tied to a stake in Rouen, France. The slaughter of fifty million buffalo to starve the American Indian into submission.

Or a child who survived a massacre in an El Salvadoran village and grew into an attorney and a novelist, only to be kidnapped by a fellow countryman and perhaps locked in a car trunk, hog-tied, eyes and mouth wrapped with tape. That image lived like a scream inside my head.

We landed off Cypremort Point and taxied across the water to a dock where Clete Purcel was waiting for us. He was wearing a windbreaker and khakis and lace-up canvas-and-rubber hunting boots, his hair blowing in the wind. He looked at Bailey, then back at me. “I got a tip.”

I waited, the wind cupping in my ears.

“From the black gal who was chugging pole for Wexler when he popped Wimple in City Park,” he said.

“We don’t need the detail,” Bailey said.

“Do you want to hear me out or not?” he replied.

“What did she say?” Bailey asked.

“She turns tricks out of a couple of motels in Lafayette,” he said. “She does specialties for geeks. She says Wexler is a regular. She had dinner one time with Cormier.”

“Dinner?” I said.

“Yeah, she knows him pretty good. She says he’s weird.”

“What does she know about Alafair?” I said.

“I’m trying to get to that,” he said. “She says Wexler and Cormier brought her to a duck camp. Cormier went off on his own while she took care of Wexler. She says Wexler told her there were drowned Nazi sailors about half a mile from shore. She thought he was making fun of her.” He kept his eyes on me.

“You know a place like that?” Bailey said.

“I’m not sure,” Clete replied.

I knew exactly where the place was, and so did Clete. In the early days of World War II, German U-boats lay in wait for the oil tankers that sailed from the refineries in Baton Rouge. In New Iberia, we could see the glow of the tankers burning at night, just beyond the southern horizon. In the fall of ’42, a German sub had been depth-charged from the air and sunk in sixty feet of water. All these years it had been sailing, as far out as the edge of the continental shelf, but it always came back to the place where it had been sunk.

“Where’s the black woman now?” Bailey said.

“I talked to her on her cell,” Clete said. “She’s not going to come anywhere near us.”

Bailey had come to the dock in a police cruiser, and I had my truck. Clete’s Caddy was parked by a boat ramp.

“I’m going to head back to town,” I said to Bailey. “I’ll call you from my house.”

“We need the black woman,” she said. “What’s her name?”

“I can’t give it to you,” Clete said.

“You’re about to get yourself in some serious trouble,” she said.

“What’s new?” he replied.

She walked away, her back stiff with anger, the wind blowing hard enough to show her scalp. I didn’t like deceiving Bailey, but I no longer trusted her, or Sean McClain, or several other colleagues who had ties to Axel Devereaux.

“I brought my AR-15,” Clete said.

“You’re sure the hooker isn’t jacking us?”

“I’m like you,” he said. “Not sure of anything. Let’s rock.”

It was almost dusk when we arrived at the southern end of Terrebonne Parish and parked on the levee. We walked down the slope into water over our ankles. I had put on a canvas coat and a hat to keep the tree limbs out of my eyes, and had stuffed one pocket with double-aught bucks and pumpkin rounds, and slung my cut-down pump from my shoulder. I had a flashlight in my other coat pocket, and a spare magazine for Clete’s AR-15. He had taken it off a drug mule he’d busted as a bail skip on Interstate 10. It was outfitted with a bump-fire stock and fired as fast as a machine gun.

The sandspits were blanketed with egrets that rose clattering in the canopy while we tried to work our way silently through the sloughs and over logs and piles of organic debris that squished under our feet and smelled like fish roe.

Air vines hung in our faces, and a bull gator slithered on its belly into a deep black pool six feet from us, and cottonmouths that had not gone into hibernation were coiled on cypress limbs just above the waterline. Behind us, out on the Gulf of Mexico, the sun was a giant dull-red orb that seemed to give no heat. Clete was ahead of me, his shoulders humped, his rifle in a sling position, a thirty-round magazine inserted in the well. He cocked his left arm, his fist clenched, signaling me to stop. Through the flooded trees and the late sunlight dancing on the water, I could see a dry mound and a cabin built of untreated pine that had turned black from lichen and water settlement and lack of sunlight. Wind chimes tinkled on the gallery, and smoke rose in the twilight from an ancient chimney and flattened in the trees. I could smell either crabs or crawfish boiling in a pot. The scene could have been lifted from 1942, just before a United States Coast Guard plane came in low over the water and dropped a single charge and broke the back of a Nazi sub.

In back of the cabin were a privy and a stump that served as a butcher block with an ax embedded in it, the nearby ground scattered with turkey and chicken feathers; a boat shed containing a pirogue that hung on wires from the ceiling; and an unmaintained levee overgrown with willow saplings and palmettos. Through the trees, I could see a white cabin cruiser in a cove, rising and falling with the incoming tide. Clete eased down into a squat and scooped mud with his left hand and rubbed it on his face, around his eyes, and on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder at me and pointed to the left, indicating that I should flank the cabin.

I shook my head. I didn’t know why. For the second time that day, I didn’t trust what I was looking at. The silence, the lack of motion, and the rigidity of the cabin seemed to contain an intensity on the brink of tearing itself apart. I had only one precedent for the feeling. Imagine a village surrounded by rice fields, a fat harvest moon above the hooches, water buffalo snuffing in a pen, villagers nowhere in sight, a shiny strand of wire stretched across the trail leading into the ville.

What do you do?

Light it up, Loot, whispers a sweaty black kid from West Memphis, Arkansas, his hands knuckling on his blooker, his breath rife with fear. Light the motherfucker up.

Clete gestured at me again. We were both on one knee now. I pointed two fingers at my eyes, then pointed at the front of the cabin. The sun was almost gone, the hummock sliding deeper into shadow. The cabin door was open. I could see a fire burning inside a woodstove, like liquid yellow-red lines sketched against the surrounding blackness. I also thought I saw the shapes of two figures, both motionless, but I couldn’t be sure. Even though we were on the cusp of winter, the air was dense with humidity, as though the environment itself were sweating. I pushed the moisture out of my eyes with the heel of my hand and tried to see clearly through the door. But as with anything you stare at too long in poor light, I could not determine where reality ended and fear and fantasy began.

Charlie’s in there. Ain’t no time to be kind to animals. Time to bring the nape, Loot.

But that was what someone wanted us to do. That’s what the bad guys always want us to do. I could hear the chop slapping against the hull of the cabin cruiser, a gator rolling in a channel and probably ripping through tangles of water hyacinths, flinging mud and water into the trees. I picked up a dirt clog and flung it to the left of the cabin.

Nothing.

Clete began working to the right. I can’t tell you how I knew something was wrong. Maybe it was Clete’s determination to mete out summary justice regardless of the attrition. Or maybe I remembered all the times he and I had gone in under a black flag and later had to deal with the specters that ask you why.

Or maybe my angle of vision was better than his. I knew there were two silhouettes beyond the doorway. One was larger than the other. The smaller figure wore a hat. Both figures were as still as the oil paint on a canvas.

I wished we had brought Bailey and backup. I tossed a piece of dirt at Clete, trying to get his attention. He kept moving in a crouch to the right, past the cabin door, then into the shadows of the trees, easing down into grass that was three feet high. I had to make a decision. I couldn’t communicate with Clete. I had no way of knowing whether he had seen the two figures. I also had no idea who they were. What if the cabin cruiser was not Wexler’s or Desmond’s but the property of a recreational fisherman who had decided to drop anchor and boil a load of crabs?

I stepped back into the overhang of the trees and worked my way around the left side of the cabin. Then I realized I had not seen everything that was behind it. Desmond’s Humvee was parked below the levee, black leaves stuck to the windows, a bullet hole pocked through the windshield on the driver’s side.

I took a chance. I was ready to eat a bullet rather than let the situation go south, which I believed was about to happen at any moment. I stood up, the breeze suddenly cool on my face. My finger was curled through the trigger guard on the twelve-gauge, my left hand on the fore-end.

“Iberia Sheriff’s Department!” I said. “We don’t care who you are or what you’re doing, but it’s going to stop! Nobody needs to get hurt! We’ll work it out!”

There was no response. The last sunlight on the Gulf had turned to pewter. The air was dense with a cold smell like waves bursting on a beach, like piled kelp, like coupling and birth, like a disinterred grave.

“You’ve got my daughter, you sons of bitches!” I said. “You’ll give her back to me or I’ll stake you out and send you into the next world one limb at a time!”

I would like to say my words were theatrical. They were not; I meant them. The problem was not ethical. The problem was they did no good.

I saw Clete rise from the grass, the bump-fire stock of his rifle pressed against his shoulder.

The next images were like stained glass breaking on a stone floor and to this day difficult to reconstruct. The first sound I heard was the popping of shells, like a string of firecrackers thrown carelessly from an automobile. At the same time I saw flashes inside the doorway of the cabin. I also thought I saw a tracer round streak from either the levee or the cove and float out over the water like a piece of broken neon.

I saw Clete begin firing into the cabin, the spent cartridges flying from the ejector port of the AR-15, the rounds whanging off the woodstove. I also heard popping from somewhere else, but I didn’t know where. I began running at Clete, yelling incoherently, waving my arms. I smashed into him and knocked him to the ground. He stared up at me, his eyes like green Life Savers inside the mud on his face. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shouted, “You wouldn’t listen! You never listen!”

His face dilated with the implication of my words. “Oh, God! Oh, God, Dave! Tell me I didn’t do that.”

I dropped my cut-down in the grass and pulled the rifle from his hands and threw away the half-spent magazine and inserted the fresh one from my coat pocket into the well. I started running for the cabin door, keeping the cabin between me and the cove and the levee. The flames in the woodstove were blazing brightly because of the holes Clete had drilled in the iron plate. The hatted figure was slumped forward in a chair. The figure next to it had fallen to the floor. I stepped inside the doorway, indifferent to whatever harm might befall me at the hands of Desmond Cormier or Lou Wexler.

The head rolled loose from the figure in the hat. The figures were mannequins. Shell casings were scattered on the floor and the top of the stove. Two were still unfired and inside the skillet that had probably been filled with them. I felt my eyes fill with water, my lungs swell with air that was dense with salt and the coldness of the Gulf.

I turned and went back through the door onto the gallery. “It’s not Alafair, Clete!”

He was on his feet now. He grinned at me, my cut-down hanging from his hand. Then there were pops and slashes of light from the darkness, and he went down on both knees, two red flowers blooming on his windbreaker, his jaw dropping, his arms dead at his sides.