The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Clete opened the top on his grill and let a cloud of white smoke rise into the trees. He pulled a longneck from a tub full of half-melted ice and twisted the cap off and set it on the picnic table. “Sit down. I’m going to fix you a sandwich. Dave Robicheaux told me he went to see you. Why don’t you talk to him?”

  “He’s a policeman.”

  “Axel Devereaux beat you up?”

  “You ain’t hearing me.” She sat at the table and put her hands over her face. “Don’t nobody hear me. Don’t nobody know what it’s like when you’re on your own against the world.”

  Clete picked up the longneck and touched her arm with it. “Drink it.”

  Her hand was shaking when she lifted the bottle; the beer spilled out of her mouth. He handed her a paper towel. “Who’s this guy getting in your head?”

  She wiped her chin. “I only went to the ninth grade.”

  “So?”

  “I know what I’m t’inking is the troot, except I cain’t find the right words for it. When I’m wit’ him, I got no power. I get weak all over. The way he touches me and talks in my ear and looks in my eyes like no man done before. It’s like he’s putting pictures in my head that ain’t supposed to be there, and it makes me scared. I cain’t sleep, no.”

  “Is this a white or a black man?”

  “A black man might hit you, but he don’t mess up your head.”

  “He’s not a pimp?”

  “No, he ain’t nothing like that.”

  Clete sliced the roast and layered two pieces of French bread on a paper plate with meat and sauce and tomatoes and lettuce and onions and set it in front of her.

  “I ain’t hungry,” she said.

  “Eat it anyway.”

  “You ain’t gonna he’p, are you.”

  “Tell me the guy’s name, and we might get somewhere.”

  “He tole me I ain’t supposed to do that. He held my chin wit’ his fingers and looked into my eyes when he said it.”

  “This guy sounds like a real piece of shit. Tell me who he is and I’ll dial him up.”

  “He said I’m a chalice. I got to be pure ’cause I’m chosen. Chosen for what?”

  “Did you ask him that?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Listen to me, Miss Hilary. You’re giving me half the story and not trusting me with the other half.”

  He waited for her to speak. She took a small bite from her sandwich and chewed as though it were cardboard. Then she took the food out of her mouth and put it on the plate. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  “Is he a client?”

  “Not in a reg’lar way.”

  “You don’t get it on with him?”

  “He gives me money and t’ings. Once he axed me to rub his back.”

  “Where did you meet this guy?”

  “At the Winn-Dixie. His basket crashed into mine. He said, ‘Sorry, pretty lady.’ ”

  Clete closed the top of the grill and sat down across from her. “Did you know Lucinda Arceneaux?”

  “I don’t know nobody named Lucinda.”

  “Her body was found floating on a wood cross in Weeks Bay.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “You don’t read the newspaper or watch the news?”

  “It don’t have nothing to do wit’ me.”

  Clete shut and opened his eyes. “Describe the pictures that the man without a name puts in your head.”

  “Horses galloping, people burning up in their shacks, children screaming. If I don’t do what he say, t’ings like that are gonna be my fault. He says we’re all part of a big plan.”

  “Are we talking about a guy named Hugo Tillinger?”

  “No.”

  “This guy is not only a bad guy, he’s a fake. The only power he has is the power you give him.”

  She stared at Clete as though he were an apparition and the man who had poisoned her mind were real. Her skin was like dark chocolate, pitted in one cheek, a scar like a piece of white string at the corner of one eye. There was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. Clete wondered whom she had been with before she had come to his cottage. He wondered how many times she had been used as a child and sworn to secrecy by her molester.

  “What was Nine/eleven, Hilary?”

  “What was what?”

  “Nine/eleven.”

  “You mean the convenience store?”

  He wrote his cell number on the back of his business card and gave it to her. “When you’re ready to give up your guy, let me know.”

  “I remember what he said now. I’m the Queen of Cups. What’s that?”

  “Some kind of bullshit he uses to scare people,” Clete said. He pulled another longneck from the cooler and screwed off the cap and drank from the bottle. “Is your baby okay?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “You need any money?”

  “What you t’ink?”

  He removed two twenties from his wallet and put them in her hand. “Stay out of bars and away from the wrong people for a few days. Call me if Axel Devereaux comes around.”

  She looked at the money. “You don’t want me to do nothing for you?”

  “One look at me in the nude and women run for the convent.”

  He thought she might smile, but she didn’t. She walked away without saying thanks or goodbye. He watched her get into her car and drive off, the muffler clanking. He hit the speed dial on his cell phone and got into his Caddy, talking on the phone, then drove down East Main to my house.

  • • •

  WE SAT ON the front steps while he told me everything Hilary Bienville had said. The sun was almost down, and through the trees I could see clouds that were crimson and yellow and half filled with rain in the afterglow.

  “You have any idea who this guy could be?” he said.

  “The same one who gave her the Maltese cross she tied on her daughter’s ankle.”

  “Yeah, but who’s the guy?”

  “Anybody can buy tarot cards in the Quarter or on the Internet.”

  Clete kept fiddling with his hands, running his fingers over his knuckles. They were the size of quarters. “What’s he after? It’s not sex.”

  “Maybe she’ll get hurt again and tell us.”

  “So just leave her alone?”

  “It’s her choice,” I said.

  “What about this guy Butterworth? Your cop friend in West Hollywood says he’s a bucket of vomit.”

  “He’s hard to read. He spends a lot of time hanging out his signs.”

  Clete stood up. “I got to go.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Not sure. Did Mon Tee Coon come back?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to have a chat with Axel Devereaux.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “The guy beats up on women. He’s about to stop. Same with hurting people’s pets.”

  I was sitting in his shadow now, the tree limbs above us clicking with hail, the last of the sunset shrinking inside clouds that were dark and swollen with rain and quivering with thunder. “What I say won’t make any difference, will it.”

  “You can’t always wait out the batter, Dave. Sometimes you have to take it to him. Devereaux is overdue.” Clete’s porkpie hat slanted on his forehead, and an unlit cigarette hung from his mouth.

  “The key is the tarot,” I said. “Devereaux is an asshole and a distraction.”

  “Not if you’re a woman and he’s pounding your face into marmalade.”

  After Clete backed into the street and drove away, the hail stopped and the rain began, big drops flattening on the heat trapped in the sidewalk and the street, filling the air with a sweetness like the summers of our youth. I got up and went inside and turned off the air-conditioning units and opened the windows, letting the house swell with wind. Then a strange sensation overtook me, in the same fashion it had on the evening I’d walked without purpose to the home of Bailey Ribbons and could give no explanation for my behavior other than the
fact that I seemed to have stepped into a vacuum in which the only sounds I heard were inside my head.

  The rain fell like drops of lead on the tin roof and the bayou. From the hall closet, I removed an old sweat-stained Stetson that had belonged to my father. I put it on and walked down to the bayou, the brim wilting with rain.

  I told myself I didn’t know why I was standing on the bank of a tidal stream in rain that was coming down harder by the second. That wasn’t true. For me, the rain has always been the conduit between the visible and the unseen worlds. Years ago my murdered wife, Annie, spoke to me in the rain, and dead members of my platoon called me on the phone during electrical storms, their voices hardly audible in the static, and my father who died in an offshore blowout appeared in the surf during a squall, still wearing his hard hat and strap overalls and steel-toed boots, giving me a thumbs-up while the waves slid across his knees, the oil rig that killed him stenciled against the sky.

  The rain was about death. It defined it. It was an old friend, and I welcomed its presence. I knew its smell when I walked past a storm drain in cold weather, or sat down to rest in an Oregon rain forest filled with lichen-covered boulders that never saw sunlight, or saw a spectral figure on the St. Charles streetcar, his head hooded, his face like gray rubber, his lips curled whimsically in a lopsided figure eight, as though he were saying Whenever you’re ready, sport.

  I heard leaves thrashing and looked upward into the live oak. Mon Tee Coon had just slipped on a branch and crashed on top of the limb below. Looking down at him was a smaller raccoon, her tail hanging off the branch.

  “Comment la vie?” I said. “Bienvenu, mon raton laveur et votre tee amis, aussi.”

  Both of them stared down at me, their coats slick with rain.

  “How about a celebratory can of sardines?” I said.

  They looked at each other, then at me.

  “C’est ce que je pensais,” I said. “Allons-allez.”

  I walked back to the house, opened the can over the sink, and emptied it on the steps. Mon Tee Coon and his lady came running.

  I thought about calling Clete and telling him that Mon Tee Coon had come home. But I didn’t. Clete was Clete, and no power on earth would ever change his mind about anything. I was also tired of trying to protect people like Axel Devereaux. Or maybe I was just tired of everything. Acceptance of death, or at least its presence, is that way sometimes and not the canker on the soul it’s made out to be.

  I had never worn my father’s battered Stetson, and it felt strange. The rain had turned to mist and was blowing through the screens. For some reason, in my mind’s eye, I saw a mesa that resembled a tombstone, one that had been placed in the foreground of a wasteland that seemed to dip into infinity.

  The phone rang on the kitchen counter. I looked at the caller ID and picked up. “What’s goin’ on, Baby Squanto?”

  “Don’t call me those stupid names,” Alafair said. “Is everything all right there?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s raining here. It never rains so hard this time of year. I’m looking out at the desert and thinking of you. I don’t know why.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure? I have this terrible feeling.”

  “You shouldn’t. Mon Tee Coon just came home.”

  “That’s wonderful. But don’t come here.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  “Through my window, I can see a huge mesa in the rain. For some reason I felt you were coming here. Maybe because you worry about me.”

  “Wrong.”

  “I have to go. Flowerpots and earthen jars are breaking on the patio.”

  “I’ll talk with you later, kid.”

  “Dave, I have an awful feeling. It’s about death. I don’t know why I feel this way.”

  “It’ll pass.”

  “What will?”

  “Fear of death.”

  “My thoughts are about you. Not me.”

  “I understand. But your worries are misplaced. Hello?”

  The line had gone dead.

  I sat down and stared through the window at the rain. A bolt of lightning split the gray sky and trembled on the iron flagpole in City Park, like an aberration in the elements that refused to die.

  Chapter Twelve

  ON SUNDAY, ALAFAIR called me from the airport in Dallas. She had taken a commercial flight and was on her way back home.

  “You quit?” I said.

  “No, Desmond and Lou had to take care of some union trouble in Los Angeles and New Orleans. I wasn’t getting anything done, so I decided to work from home.”

  “Was that all right with them?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  I picked her up in Lafayette. We had slipped into Indian summer without being aware of it. The sky was as hard and blue as porcelain, the oak leaves red and gold and clicking like crickets when they rolled across the lawn in the wind. I knew somehow that better days lay ahead.

  I fixed dinner for us when we got home, and later, we fed Snuggs on the kitchen floor and Mon Tee Coon and his girlfriend on top of Tripod’s hutch. That night we slept with the windows open, and I could smell the camellias and the dense lemony fragrance of our late-blooming magnolia in the side yard. As I drifted off to sleep, I resolved to capture and protect each spoonful of sunshine allotted me for the rest of my life, and not go with the season or lend myself to doomed causes.

  I woke at six-fifteen to the sounds of rain and the phone ringing. I picked up the phone and went into the kitchen so as not to awake Alafair. It was Sean McClain. “I’m in front of Axel Devereaux’s place by the drawbridge on Loreauville Road. I need a witness here.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s something wrong in that house. People know I don’t get along with Devereaux or his buddies. I don’t want to be busting in on my own.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was passing his house a half hour ago. All the lights were on and the shades down. A black SUV was in the yard. I saw a woman come running out the back door and thought I heard glass breaking.”

  “Go on.”

  “I slowed down but didn’t stop.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t want to mix in his personal business.”

  He had already made two mistakes: He had ignored a battery situation in progress, and he hadn’t called it in. I didn’t want to think about what was coming next.

  “What made you change your mind?” I said.

  “I go off at oh-seven-hundred. I thought I’d make one more pass. The SUV was bagging down the road. I didn’t get a tag. The lights were off in the house, and a front window was broken and the shade and screen hanging outside. Devereaux’s truck was in the shed. This time I knocked on the door. No answer.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In the front yard.”

  “Try again.”

  “I pert’ near shook it off the blocks already.”

  “You tried the back?”

  “Yes, sir. I hit on the bedroom wall.”

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  I brushed my teeth and washed my face and took a small bottle of orange juice and a cinnamon roll out of the icebox and headed up Loreauville Road. The rain had quit and the sky was an ink wash, as though the sun had refused to rise. A blanket of white fog was rolling off the bayou when I turned onto Axel Devereaux’s property. Sean was waiting on the gallery. An empty whiskey bottle wet with dew glittered in the yard. I walked up the steps.

  “You know Axel’s a juicer, don’t you?” I said.

  “If that’s the problem, he must have tied on a whammeroo.”

  I pounded with the flat of my fist on the door. “It’s Dave Robicheaux and Sean McClain! Open up, Devereaux!”

  I took out a handkerchief and twisted the knob. It was locked tight. I stepped back and balanced myself with the screen and kicked the wood door with the bottom of my shoe. The second time it splintered off the jamb. A
xel seemed to have cleaned up the damage done to his living room by Hugo Tillinger. Through the hallway I could barely make out a figure sitting motionlessly at the breakfast table, his back to us. Then I realized he was wearing a peaked hat, dripping with bells like ornaments on a small Christmas tree.

  I walked through the hallway with Sean behind me. He looked over my shoulder. “Oh, man.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Get Bailey and Helen on the horn. Don’t let a photographer get near this.”

  “They say they got a right.”

  “Devereaux wasn’t worth the spit on the sidewalk. But we don’t punish the family.”

  • • •

  I BELIEVED A FIGHT or an attempt to flee the house had begun in the living room and ended in the kitchen. Dishes and glassware were broken. Cutlery from a wooden knife block was splayed on the floor. The icebox door was open, a carton of milk on its side, leaking into the vegetable tray. The air-conditioning units were turned on full blast, the back door key-locked, the key gone.

  Even in death, Axel’s face resembled a boiled egg, the eyes open wide, disbelieving. His wrists were fastened behind the chair with plastic ligatures. A short baton had been shoved down the throat and into the chest, prizing up the chin. But I doubted that was the cause of his death. A leather loop, one with three knots tied in it, had been flipped over his neck. The burns went a quarter inch into the tissue. A Lincoln-green felt cap hung with tiny chrome bells had been snugged on his head.

  The medics and the ambulance were the first to arrive, then Helen and Bailey and Cormac Watts. Through the front window I saw a television truck and the automobile of a Daily Iberian reporter coming up the road. Sean was in the backyard. He was wearing latex gloves. He bent over and picked up a key and used it to open the back door. “Why would the killer want to lock up a corpse?”

  “To give himself as much time as possible to get out of town.”

  “You suspect he cranked up the air conditioners?”

  “That’s the way I’d read it.”

  “Damn, I wish I’d pulled in when I saw that woman run out the back door.”

  “Axel dealt the hand a long time ago, Sean. He was a cruel, evil man, and he died the death of one.”

  “Ain’t nobody deserves going out like this,” he said. “Look at the butt end of the baton.”