“You learn that in a Buddhist monastery?”
The bartender didn’t answer. Clete tipped the shot glass to his lips, then did it a second time and drained it, chasing it with half the longneck. He took out his wallet. The bills in it seemed to go in and out of focus. His stomach was roiling. He knew the signs. Somewhere down in the basement, the cannon on the Zippo track had fired to life, arcing a flame into a straw hooch, the slick hovering overhead, people from the ville splashing into a rice paddy.
“We’re square,” the bartender said.
“You poisoned my drink?”
“We’re kind to people with pickled brains.”
Clete picked up his porkpie hat from the bar and put it on. “Don’t let me in here again.”
He went outside into a misting rain and the smell of the bayou. In the distance he could see lights burning in the sugarcane refinery and smoke rising from the stacks, electricity leaping through the thunderheads. A gas-guzzler was idling in the parking lot, the driver’s door open, the ignition wires hanging under the dashboard. Travis Lebeau had assumed the position, both hands on the hood, his legs spread.
Don’t do this, said a voice inside Clete’s head.
“Why y’all bracing this poor bastard?” Clete said.
“We know you?” Axel said.
“Clete Purcel. I got a PI office on Main Street.”
“So you know what ‘on the job’ means. In your case, it also means get lost.”
“This guy’s my confidential informant. That makes my lawyer his counsel. That means right of presence extends to me.”
Axel laughed. “Where’d you get that?”
“The guy’s trying to go straight,” Clete said. “Give him a break.”
“He stole this car,” Axel said. “Check the ignition.”
“I got the pink slip,” Travis said over his shoulder. “I lost the key.”
“I’ll take him home,” Clete said.
“You’re interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty,” Axel said.
“You were the guard who stuck a sock down an inmate’s throat?”
“No, this is what I did,” Axel said. “Because he doesn’t know when to leave the wrong broad alone.” He inserted a short wood club between Travis’s legs and wedged it into his colon. Travis clenched his buttocks, the blood draining from his face. “Got the message?” Axel said.
“Yeah!” Travis said, his knees shaking.
Axel pulled the club loose. “That’s better. We’re getting there.”
“You’re on a pad for a pimp?” Clete said to Axel.
“We’re telling you this guy is driving drunk and probably driving a stolen car,” the other man said. His hair was scalped on the sides. There was a circle of whiskers around his mouth. “We’ll put him on a D-ring and have his car towed, then buy you a drink. How about it?”
“Who’s the pimp y’all in with?” Clete said.
Axel turned around and rested the point of his club on Clete’s sternum. “You’re way over the line, lard-ass.” He moved the club up Clete’s chest to his throat and chin. “You copy?”
Clete’s right hand opened and closed in the darkness. He gazed at the rain rings on the bayou, the wobbling reflection of a house trailer on its surface. The wind changed, and he smelled an odor like mushrooms on a grave, like a disturbed bog deep in a swamp, the water swelling over his shoes and ankles. Someone pushed open the front door of the nightclub. Clete heard the woman on the stage singing a tale about the House of the Rising Sun.
“Take the baton out of my face, please,” he said.
“No problem,” Axel said. “We cool?”
“No.”
“You’re Robicheaux’s cornhole buddy, aren’t you.”
“We both worked homicide at NOPD. Before that we walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter.”
“He’s muffing his new partner?”
“Didn’t quite hear that,” Clete said.
“Tell him not to let his mustache get in the way. Or maybe he wants to smell it all day.”
Clete stepped backward, blood thudding in his wrists. He gazed at the bayou; wind wrinkled the surface. “I’m going to walk back inside.”
“I say something wrong?” Axel said. “We’re all ears.”
“I’ll follow y’all to the booking room,” Clete said. “My friend Travis better not have any alterations on him.”
“I heard you took juice when you worked vice,” Axel said. “You also chugged pud for the Mob in Vegas.”
“You probably heard right,” Clete said.
“You’re the great Clete Purcel, huh?” Axel said. “I’d better watch out for you.”
He and his partner cuffed Travis and put him into an unmarked car, hitting his head as they pushed him in the back seat. The rain was falling harder now, ticking on Clete’s porkpie hat. He thought he heard an electrical short buzzing inside his head. He watched the three men drive away, his viscera turning to water.
He went back inside and sat at the bar. He blotted the rain off his face with his sleeve. “Give the singer whatever she’s having. Same with the lady down the bar.”
“What happened out there?” the bartender said.
“Nothing. Who’s running the action?”
“What action?”
Clete nodded toward the end of the bar.
“Ain’t nobody running it. It runs itself. Don’t get your necktie in it, man. You’ll have your face in the garbage grinder.”
Chapter Seven
CLETE DIDN’T TELL me about it until Monday, in my office.
“Did Travis file charges?” I said.
“For what?” he said.
“Axel Devereaux putting a baton up his colon.”
“A guy with a sheet like his thinks he’s going to get justice?” he said.
“I need to tell Helen about this.”
“I just saw Axel Devereaux outside. He looked right through me.”
“Get away from these guys, Clete.”
“It wasn’t me who started it.”
He had a point. Cops like Devereaux were part of the system. We created and nurtured and protected them, always to our detriment and never learning from the experience. “Where’s Travis?”
“I went his bail.”
“So you think we’ve got a deputy who’s a part-time pimp?”
“Who knows? We got black kids selling dope in front of their houses at three-thirty in the afternoon.”
“What’s the name of the hooker?”
“I never asked. I bought her a few drinks.”
He was wearing a loose suit and a crisp sport shirt without a tie. His eyes were smoky green, impossible to read, his face free of alcohol.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “Clean those thoughts out of your head.”
“Which thoughts?”
“Squaring things with Devereaux on your own.”
“I shouldn’t have told you what Devereaux said about Bailey Ribbons,” he said.
“I’ll take care of that through the proper procedure.”
“Proper procedure? Lovely. Do you know what my greatest fear is?”
“No clue,” I said.
“That one day you’ll find out who you really are and shoot yourself.”
• • •
AFTER WORK I drove in my pickup to the blues club on the bayou. The sun was low and red in the west; dust drifted from the cane fields. I went inside and opened my badge holder on the bartender.
“I know who you are,” he said.
“Clete Purcel was in here Friday night,” I said. “There was a black woman sitting at the end of the bar. She had on a navy blue coat with big brass buttons. She followed him into the restroom.”
The bartender popped a counter rag idly in the air, looking down the bar at an empty stool. “Yeah, I remember. What about her?”
“What’s her name?”
“Hilary Bienville. She drinks in here. But that’s all she does.”
“How many nights a week does she come in?”
“Four or five.”
“Who does she come in with?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Who does she leave with?”
“Same answer.”
“Where does she live?”
“Don’t know exactly.”
“You know who Axel Devereaux is?”
“No, suh.”
The bartender began rinsing out a washrag in the sink, his eyes lidded. A black woman with a slim figure in a tight black skirt and a green cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons and glass Mardi Gras beads in her hair was tuning her guitar on the stage. Her hair hung in her face, but I had the feeling her gaze was on me rather than the tuning pegs.
“Axel Devereaux is a dirty cop,” I said to the bartender. “Why carry his weight?”
“Way it is, suh.”
“Lose the Stepin Fetchit routine.”
He leaned toward me, his head round and slick and small for his big shoulders. “I ain’t got to take this.”
“You’re right.” I placed my business card in front of him. “I’ll tell Devereaux you’re a stand-up guy. I see you’ve got a mop and pail back there. That might make a great coat of arms.”
I went outside and got into my truck. But I didn’t leave. The light began to go out of the sky, and birds were gathering inside the oaks along the bayou, the tree frogs singing. Fifteen minutes passed. Then the front door opened and the woman in the cowboy shirt and Mardi Gras beads came out and popped a paper match and lit a cigarette in a holder and flipped the match away. She came to my window, smoke sliding from her lips. “What’s goin’ on, darlin’?”
“No haps.”
“Girl you looking for gonna need some he’p. You’ll find her in the trailer court by the drawbridge in Jeanerette, right acrost from the big plantation house.”
“Is she in danger?”
“She dimed Axel Devereaux wit’ your PI friend.”
“Where’d you get the scar on your neck?”
“I’m a Mississippi nigger. I got all kinds of stories.”
“You’re from New Orleans,” I said. “Don’t put yourself down, beautiful.”
“How you know I’m from New Orleans?”
“You’ve got an accent like an angel.”
She slipped her fingernails into my hair. “Come see me sometime when you ain’t working. I can burn away your blues.”
“I’m too green to burn,” I said.
She smiled, her gold-rimmed teeth glinting. “You got a gris-gris on you, baby. Let Mama know when you need some he’p.”
She picked my hand up off the steering and tenderly bit my finger.
• • •
I WOKE HARD AND throbbing in the morning, filled with all the desire and longing that old men never lose, no matter how dignified they may behave. The manifestation of that desire takes many forms, none of them predictable and none of them good.
At 8:16 a.m., I followed Axel Devereaux into the department men’s room. He wet his comb at the sink. I stood behind him but didn’t speak. He tapped the water off his comb and put it into his shirt pocket, watching me in the mirror.
“You look a little out of joint. Somebody cross her legs on your nose?” he said.
“I don’t like to talk to a reflection.”
He turned slowly, his eyes meeting mine. His forearms were thick and solid, wrapped with monkey hair. “Purcel been talking to you?”
I slapped him across the face. His skin was as coarse as emery paper. He stared at me unblinking, his face stark, as if someone had flashed a strobe on it in a dark room. I’ve known evil men, but I had never seen any man’s eyes look the way his did. There was a dirtiness in them that had no bottom.
“Speak disrespectfully about my partner again and I’ll hang you by your toes and cut your tongue out,” I said. “That’s not a metaphor.”
His gaze slipped off mine and focused on empty space.
“Did you hear me?” I said.
He walked past me and out the door, causing two deputies to step aside, water dripping from his hair onto his shirt.
I stood in the middle of the room, trembling with anger, my ears ringing. I washed my hands, trying to scrub the feel of his whiskers off my skin.
• • •
AT FIVE P.M., I drove down Bayou Teche to Jeanerette, past Alice Plantation, built in 1803, with its palm trees and elevated wide gallery and twin chimneys, and past another plantation home surrounded by live oaks that were two centuries old. I crossed a drawbridge and turned in to a trailer park that looked transported from Bangladesh.
The manager of the park pointed to the trailer rented by Hilary Bienville. It was set on cinder blocks, the seams orange with rust, the floor sagging. I tapped on the door.
A young black woman answered, hooking the screen door as soon as she saw my badge holder. “What you want?”
“I’m Dave Robicheaux, a friend of Clete Purcel. I’d like to talk with you.”
“I’m fixing to eat.”
“You tried to help out a worthless man named Travis Lebeau. Not everybody would do that, Miss Hilary.”
“Who tole you where I live?”
“A lady who sings the blues.”
“Somebody is after me?”
“You know Axel Devereaux?”
“I ain’t said nothing about Mr. Axel.”
“But you know him?”
“Everybody knows Axel Devereaux.”
“I work homicide and felony assault, not vice,” I said. I took a photo out of my wallet. It showed Clete and me together at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, Florida. “Give me five minutes.”
She looked at my truck and studied my face, then stared at the other trailers and the clothes flapping on wash lines. She unhooked the screen. “I got to get my dinner out of the micro.”
I stepped inside. The walls were covered with pages cut from movie magazines. Most of the actors in the photos were black. A large green bottle of bulk wine stood on her kitchen table. She removed the frozen dinner from the microwave and set it on a place mat.
“I got a baby to feed before my gran’mama come over,” she said. “Make it fast, okay?”
“How many nights do you work?”
“Six. Don’t work Sundays. Sunday ain’t never good in my bidness.”
“You’re a better person than you think,” I said.
“Try to pay your bills with that.”
“If you’re lucky, the pimp who owns you takes only thirty-five percent. He pieces off another twenty percent to Axel. Once in a while your pimp runs a Murphy scam on a guy and you make a little more. Does that sound like a reasonable way to make a living?”
“It’s better than scrubbing a flo’ for a white man that spits on it.” She peeled the plastic off her dinner, indifferent to the heat, her eyes starting to film.
“The nuns at Southern Mutual Help can get you a new start,” I said.
She didn’t reply. She bowed her head and began taking small bites. She wiped her nose with her wrist.
I got a roll of paper towels off the drainboard and set it beside her. “It sounds like your baby is up.”
She set down her fork. “She needs changing.”
“I’ll do it.”
I went into a tiny side room where a baby of about nine or ten months lay on her side in a crib. I removed the dirty diaper and wiped her down and replaced it with a clean one. She looked curiously into my face and smiled when I rattled a toy and put it in her hand. A piece of red twine with an eight-point cross on it, stamped from brass, was knotted around her ankle.
I went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table without being asked. “That’s a sweet baby.”
“T’ank you.”
“Where’d you get that charm on her ankle?”
“Mine to know.”
“Don’t put it on the child’s neck.”
“I ain’t gonna do somet’ing like that.”
�
��You believe in the gris-gris?” I asked.
“I seen dead people. They got hungry eyes. It’s ’cause they cain’t eat or drink till they get inside someone and do it t’rew them.”
“You see these dead people at night?” I said.
“In the daylight. Standing right next to me in the grocery store. A lot of people ain’t what they look like. There’s a second person inside them.”
She did not speak like an ignorant person or even one who was superstitious. And for that reason she really bothered me. She looked through the window. “There’s my gran’mama.”
“The charm is called the Maltese cross. You won’t tell me where you got it?”
“A bubblegum machine,” she said.
“Who’s your pimp, Miss Hilary?”
“Like I’m gonna tell you?”
“Here’s my business card. If you want to get out of the life, call me. Don’t let Axel push you around. He’s a bully and a coward.”
“So how come he’s a deputy sheriff?”
• • •
HELEN CALLED ME into her office the next afternoon. “Somebody poisoned Sean McClain’s pets.”
“When?” I said.
“He fed them last night. This morning they were dead. Whoever did it wanted to get both the cat and the dog. There was butcher paper with ground meat in the kennel, and a sardine can on the grass.”
“Did Sean have trouble with his neighbors?”
“Sean doesn’t have trouble with anyone. Except for a couple of wiseasses in the department.”
“Axel Devereaux is one of those wiseasses?”
“Devereaux knows you’re protective of Sean.”
“It goes deeper than that,” I said. “Sean slammed Devereaux in the head with a napkin dispenser at Victor’s.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Devereaux shouldn’t be a member of the department.”
“When I fire him arbitrarily, you can handle the lawsuit,” she said.
“I think he may be working with a pimp.”
“Which pimp?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I talked to a black prostitute in Jeanerette. She wouldn’t give him up. Do we have anything more on the escaped convict from Texas?”
“No, why?”
“The prostitute is named Hilary Bienville. Her baby had a Maltese cross tied on her ankle. It was an icon worn by Crusader knights.”
The New Iberia Blues Page 7
