“She just said they’d he’p me.”
“Which people in particular?”
“She didn’t say. There was one local name she gave me, though. A bad cop. He runs whores and such.”
“What does the dirty cop have to do with getting you off death row?”
“Nothing. Miss Lucinda said she wanted to put him out of business because he preyed on black women. You recording this?”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think y’all cain’t find your asses with both hands.”
“It’s been good talking to you.”
“I’m fixing to make a statement, the kind a guy will remember, get my drift?”
“No, I don’t. I think talking to you is a waste of time.”
I hung up and waited. Five minutes later, he called back. “She left the airport with somebody she knew and trusted, somebody who was more important to her than the catering people or the boyfriend waiting to pick up her in Hollywood,” he said. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“You’re an intelligent man.”
“I’m a dead man walking, and we both know it,” he said. “You know what the upside of that is?”
“You’ve got nothing to lose.”
“See? You’re a smart son of a buck yourself.”
An escapee from death row who didn’t use coarse language? This case was getting muddier by the day.
• • •
AT DAYBREAK ON Tuesday, Lou Wexler arrived in his Lamborghini to take Alafair to the private jet that would deliver them to Monument Valley, Arizona, in time for a late lunch. She gave me a card with the name and number and email address of the hotel where she would be staying. I asked her to step aside for a moment.
“What is it?” she said.
“I have to ask you something of a personal nature. I don’t want to offend you.”
She searched my face. “Don’t say it, Dave.”
“I have to.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Do you have a single room?”
“You have no right to ask me that.”
“I don’t care. I’m your father. I don’t trust any of these guys.”
“That’s obvious. Goodbye. I’ll call you when we get there. Dave, you really know how to do it.”
As they backed out in the street, Wexler lifted his hat in a salute. I squinted one eye and cocked my thumb and aimed my index finger at him.
• • •
AXEL DEVEREAUX DIDN’T show up for the 0800 roll call. Instead, he called Helen from his home. She walked down to my office and opened the door without knocking. “Get Bailey and go over to Devereaux’s place. Somebody creeped his house.”
“You want us to investigate a B and E?”
“It sounds like it’s more than a B and E,” she said. “Maybe justice is finally catching up with this asshole.”
Bailey checked out a cruiser, and the two of us rode up the bayou to the drawbridge south of Loreauville where Axel lived by himself in a smudged stucco house with Styrofoam litter and car parts and two boats and stacks of crab traps in the yard. He met us at the door in a rage.
“Calm down,” I said.
“Look at my place. He did it in my sleep,” he said.
“Who did?” I said, stepping inside.
“The exterminator,” he said.
“Which exterminator?” I asked.
“A freelancer,” Axel said. “He was going from door to door yesterday.”
“You don’t use a regular service?” Bailey said.
So far he had not acknowledged her presence. “I take care of the termites myself. The guy gave me a deal.”
“How do you know the exterminator is the vandal?” she said.
“I keep a spare set of keys on the dresser,” Axel said. “I didn’t notice they were missing until this morning. Nobody else has been in here except me.”
The living room was a masterpiece of destruction, one that had obviously been accomplished with silent perfection. The couch and chairs had been sliced, perhaps with an X-Acto knife or a barber’s razor, the stuffing pulled out, the cheap decorative prints on the walls and the photos on the mantel slashed and pulled from the frames, the carpets and wood floor layered with paint. In the kitchen and bathroom, the intruder or intruders had poured concrete mix down the drains and oil sludge and glue in the appliances. A deer rifle and a shotgun and a German Luger had been taken from a closet, five hundred dollars from a desk drawer, a gold watch and a derringer from a jewelry box.
Bailey peered out the window at the backyard. A new electric-blue Ford pickup was parked by a tin boat shed. She went out the screen door.
“Where’s she going?” Axel said.
“Obviously to look around. You want us here or not?”
“What’s with you, Robicheaux? I never had a beef with you.”
“You’ve got a beef with the world, Axel. What was the exterminator’s name?”
“I didn’t get it. He’s an exterminator.”
“You didn’t look at his license or proof of insurance?”
“Crawling under the house and spraying poison on Formosan termites doesn’t take a college degree.”
“You didn’t hear anything during the night? While he was demolishing your house?”
“I had a couple of drinks. Somebody left a bottle of Dewar’s on the gallery.”
“That didn’t seem odd to you?” I asked.
“People leave me gifts.”
“For doing what?”
“For helping them,” he replied. “For doing my job.”
“What did the exterminator look like?”
“White, medium height, stocky, black curly hair, unshaved.”
“From around here?”
“Texas or Mississippi.”
“What kind of vehicle did he drive?”
“An SUV, lot of mud on it, Louisiana tag.”
“Remember the number?”
“I didn’t pay it any mind. I didn’t have any reason to.”
“Quit dancing around the problem, Axel. You hired an illegal sprayer.”
“Oh, I’ll live in remorse over that.” He bent down to see under the window shade. “What’s that bitch doing?”
“You call her that again and I’ll take your head off.”
“Try it. Either here or anywhere else.” He pointed at his cheek. “I haven’t forgotten what you did in the restroom. That one isn’t going away.”
I closed my notebook and clicked on a photo in my iPhone. “You recognize this guy?”
“That’s him, the exterminator.”
“That’s Hugo Tillinger.”
“The escapee? Why’s he after me?”
“Did you know Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“I saw her around, maybe. She was a do-gooder or something.”
“Yeah, or something. Why would Tillinger come after you, Axel?”
“Why does somebody get hit by lightning?”
Bailey came back through the door. “You didn’t check your truck?”
“I looked out the window. It was all right. It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Sorry I have to tell you this,” she said. “You have four slashed tires. Your seats and headliner and door panels are slashed. There’s an empty sugar sack by your gas cap. The ignition was on, but the engine had died. The hood is still warm. The engine must have run quite a while.”
“The fuck?” Axel said.
She dropped the keys in his palm, releasing them high enough so her hand didn’t touch his. She gazed at him silently, in a benign way, as if staring at a stranger in a casket.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Why is this happening? Why am I getting treated like I’m the stink on shit?”
“Tillinger had a reason for doing this,” I said. “You know what it is. Want to tell us?”
“Get out of here,” he said.
“Gladly,” I said.
“What are you looking at?” he said to Bailey.
• • •
ALAFAIR CALLED ME from Arizona late that afternoon. “You should see it here,” she said.
“Beautiful, huh?” I replied, a strange longing in my heart at the sound of my daughter’s voice.
“I didn’t mean to be hard on you this morning.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have a way of saying all the wrong things at the wrong time.”
“I have a single room. Lou is just a friend.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Yes, I do. You want to protect me. But I’m fine. Give me some credit.”
“Is Desmond out there?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“He’s decent to women.”
“But the people he works with are not?”
“I don’t trust Butterworth, that’s for sure.”
“He’s still at Cypremort Point.”
“When will you be back?”
“In a few days, probably. Dave, are you sure about Desmond?”
“How do you mean?”
“Sometimes he goes inside himself and doesn’t come back for a while.”
“He’s probably a depressive. Most artists are.”
“I asked him about it,” she said. “Know what he said? ‘Dead poets are always speaking to us. You better listen to them. If you don’t, they get mad.’ ”
I felt like someone had poured ice water on my back.
“Are you there?” she said.
“The last person who said something like that to me was a prostitute who lives in that trailer slum by the Jeanerette drawbridge.”
“That’s not unusual in Acadiana.”
“Her baby had a charm tied on her ankle. It was a Maltese cross. The mother wouldn’t tell me where she got it. There was a tiny ankle chain on Lucinda Arceneaux’s body, with a piece of silver wire attached.”
“You’re scaring me, Dave.”
“Come on back home.”
“I can’t do that. I made a commitment. Why don’t you come out? You’d love it here. It’s like stepping into eternity.”
“You were born to be a writer, Alfenheimer.”
I was on my cell phone in the backyard. I saw a gator slip under the hyacinths, its serrated tail slicing through the flowers and tendrils.
“I love you, Dave.”
“You, too, kid,” I replied.
“I have to go now. I’ll call in the morning.”
I said goodbye and closed my cell. I heard a sound in the oak limbs above me and felt a shower of leaves come down on my head, and I thought perhaps Mon Tee Coon had returned. A hoot owl with an injured wing was caught in the branches. I got a ladder from my toolshed and climbed into the tree and brought him down and placed him in a cardboard box and called a friend in Loreauville who ran an animal sanctuary and would pick up the bird. Then I drove to the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, from which I had graduated in 1960 with a teacher’s certificate and a degree in English.
Chapter Eleven
I PARKED MY PICKUP under the oaks by Burke-Hawthorne Hall and walked to the library. The advantage of having a little knowledge about the classical world is that few other people do. The second advantage is your awareness that every problem facing us today has already occurred many times previously, and the behavior of the players is always predictable and the consequences are always the same. It’s a bit like going to the track with the names of the winners and losers in your pocket.
Every literary plot is either in the Bible, Greek mythology, or Elizabethan theater. Hemingway said it was all right for an author to steal as long as he improved the material. I felt the same way about a homicide investigation. The externals were cosmetic. The motivations were not a mystery. Avarice, fear, sexual passion, revenge, a desire for power, rage that produced a chemical assault on the brain, this was the detritus floating in the gene pool. Read Charles Dickens’s journalistic account of a public execution in London. It will make you want to flee humanity.
I put my notebook and a yellow legal pad on a big table in the archive reading room and tried to give a degree of coherence to the events that had occurred since I first saw the body of Lucinda Arceneaux bobbing in Weeks Bay. The apparent ritualistic hanging of Joe Molinari’s fly-infested corpse in a shrimp net, a walking cane plunged through his chest, made no sense unless you linked his death to Arceneaux’s. In the meantime, Hugo Tillinger had become a serious presence in our midst. He now had weapons and money courtesy of Axel Devereaux, and a cause to go with them, one involving prostitution.
Hilary Bienville had tied a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle with a piece of red twine, then claimed—facetiously, I’m sure—that she had gotten it from a bubblegum machine. When I’d pressed her about it, she had said, “Mine to know,” in a prideful fashion. In the library I found seven books that dealt specifically with Crusader knights. The Maltese cross was supposedly the sign of a late-sixteenth-century group, although it may have had earlier origins. No matter. It symbolized the ethos of the knight errant who, with body armor and chainmail and spiked mace and broadsword, managed to synthesize the noblest aspects of Christianity with bloodlust.
I stayed in the library until closing time, my eyes burning. At a certain time in your life, you accept the fact that lunacy comes in many forms. Is there a more disturbing sound than hobnailed boots striking a cobblestoned street in unison? Or our penchant for using ritual and procedure to give plausibility to the unthinkable? Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps. If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.
I thanked the reference librarian for her help and walked back to my pickup. The campus was dark, the sky sprinkled with stars. When I reached my truck, I saw that a sheet of spiral notebook paper had been placed under my windshield wiper. The message was printed in ballpoint, each letter a composite of slashes:
Dear Detective Roboshow,
Enjoyed talking to you on the phone. Hope you read the Bible. The following from Psalms is one of my favorite quotes. “Arise, O Jehovah; Save me, O my God: For thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; Thou hast broken the teeth of the wicked.”
Your friend?
H.T.
I folded the note and placed it in my shirt pocket. I had a feeling Tillinger was watching me, but I gave him no indication. The moon was up, the shadows of flooded trees moving on the water of Cypress Lake by the old student center. I slipped my snub-nose .38 special from my snap-on belt holster and held it behind my hip. I walked down to the edge of the water. “You out there, Hugo?”
There was no response.
“You shouldn’t be bird-dogging me, partner,” I said.
I heard a splash. It could have been either a frog or someone throwing a dirt clod into the lake.
“Maybe we’ve got the same goal,” I said. “Nobody is worried about you creeping Axel Devereaux’s house. The firearms are another matter. Maybe you’ll beat death row in Texas. Don’t blow it by getting into an assault beef in Louisiana.”
I thought I saw a silhouette merge with the corner of the student center, but I couldn’t be sure. No sound came from the lakeside or the walkways. I got into my truck and started the engine. Then the words from the Book of Psalms came back to me, and I squeezed my eyes shut at their implication.
• • •
I WENT INTO HELEN’S office early the next morning.
“The note is from Hugo Tillinger?” she said.
“Who else?”
“Look, I’m not exactly a biblical scholar. Run that quotation by me again.”
“It refers to Jehovah breaking the teeth of the wicked.”
Her eyes were fastened on mine. “Travis Lebeau,” she said. “His teeth were pulled out.”
“Yep.”
“Lebeau was Tillin
ger’s friend.”
“Maybe the quotation is coincidence. Or maybe Tillinger is a real nightmare.”
“I hope he’s our guy,” she said. “I’d like to put all this craziness on one guy and shut him down.”
“Except it’s a whole lot more complicated, isn’t it?”
“To say the least,” she replied. “Just before you came in, I got a call from Desmond Cormier. He said he wants to cast Bailey Ribbons in his movie, but he doesn’t want to cause her conflict.”
“Then why does he create conflict?”
“I said something similar. How’s Bailey working out?”
“Good. The best,” I said.
“Really?”
“Is that supposed to have a second meaning?” I said.
“Nope. Just asking.” She leaned back in her swivel chair, her eyes unfocused, her face wan. “Some fun, huh, bwana?”
• • •
WHILE IN NEW IBERIA, Clete Purcel lived on East Main at the Teche Motel, a 1940s motor court with cottages on either side of a narrow strip of tree-shaded asphalt that dead-ended in an oak grove on the bayou. Two or three evenings a week he cooked a pork roast or a chicken on a grill under the oaks, and shared it with anyone who wanted to sit down with him. Late Wednesday afternoon a smoking gas-guzzler gnarled with dents made its way down to the last cottage on the asphalt. Hilary Bienville got out and knocked on the cottage door.
“I’m over here,” Clete said.
She twitched at the sound of his voice. “Can I talk wit’ you?”
“Yeah. Who told you where I live?”
She walked toward him. She wore jeans and sandals and a man’s khaki shirt tied at the waist. “The bartender at the club.”
“What happened to your face?”
“Tripped on the stairs.”
“You live in a trailer.”
“Tripped somewhere else.”
“Who did that to you?” he said.
“Ain’t important.”
“You went to the hospital?”
“I don’t mess with them emergency room people.”
“Axel Devereaux beat you up?”
“I’m scared, Mr. Clete.”
“I’m not a ‘mister.’ Answer me.”
“I don’t care about Axel. I’m here about somebody else. What he’s doing to me.” She pointed at her head. “Inside here.”
The New Iberia Blues Page 10
