The waitress put the tea and a coaster by my hand. “Are you with the film crew?”
“Afraid not. I’m just a tourist,” I said.
“Must be nice, huh?”
“What must be nice?”
“To live like that. To make movies and not have to worry about anything.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Let me know if you want anything.”
I watched her walk away and tried not to look below the level of her waist, then put the charge on my room and left a five-dollar bill under my glass, even though that was more than my personal budget allowed. I used the stairs rather than the elevator to reach my floor and spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the faucet but to no avail. I lay down and put a pillow over my head, the afternoon sun as red as fire behind my eyelids.
• • •
ALAFAIR WAS LATE getting back from the set. I had dinner with Clete in a Mexican restaurant and told him about my phone call to Helen and the information I had given her about Clete’s decision to let Hugo Tillinger go. I also told him about the penalty she had imposed on me, as well as her feelings about Clete’s cutting Tillinger slack a second time.
“A fed says he tore up somebody in the AB with a mattock?” Clete said.
“Which means maybe he put the baton down Axel Devereaux’s throat.”
“Why didn’t the fed do something about it?” Clete said. “Why’s he dropping this on us?”
“Nobody is dropping anything on us. You made a choice, and so did I. It was the wrong choice.”
“Dave, I don’t have the legal power to arrest anyone. I can take skips into custody because they’re considered property, but that’s it. Helen is wrong on this.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“I’m sorry you got your ticket pulled, big mon.”
“Like you say, we’re getting too old for this crap.”
“Come in with me. We’ll put the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide back in business.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll sit around and suffer,” he said.
“Lay off it, Cletus. I don’t feel too well right now.”
“You really believe Tillinger would take out a guy with a mattock?” he asked.
“I think Tillinger and a few like him could found a new religion that would make radical Islam look like the teachings of Saint Francis.”
• • •
THE TAILINGS OF the monsoon season moved across the sun that evening, darkening and wetting the land and lighting the sky with electricity that quivered and disappeared between the buttes and the clouds. It was Desmond Cormier’s birthday. The party began on the terrace, under canopies hung with Japanese lanterns. As the storm dissipated, the celebrants moved down the slope into a picnic area that had a wood dance floor and kiva fireplaces. A band featuring conga drums and horns and a marimba and oversize mariachi guitars played inside a gazebo. Desmond was soused to the eyes and dancing by himself with a bottle of champagne, dressed in tight cutoffs and a T-shirt scissored across the midriff, the smooth firmness of his physique and his wide-set washed-out eyes and his tombstone teeth and the bulge in his shorts and the solipsistic glaze on his face a study in sensuality.
Clete and Alafair and I sat at a table by one of the clay fireplaces and rolled lettuce and tomato and shredded cheese and strips of steak inside tortillas and watched Desmond dance. The flames from the gas lamps painted his body with bands of yellow and orange like the reflections of an ancient fire on a cave wall. A tall, very thin woman with jet-black hair and milk-white skin and a dress slit to the top of the thigh tried to dance with him, her eyes fastened on his. But if she desired to make use of the moment and become a soul mate with Des, she had underestimated the challenge. He scooped her up, one arm under her rump, and waltzed in a circle, holding up the magnum bottle with his other hand, while everyone applauded and the thin woman tried to hide her surprise and embarrassment.
I felt a shadow fall across the side of my face. I turned and looked up at Antoine Butterworth.
“Good evening, all,” he said.
“Hello, Antoine,” Alafair said. She looked worriedly at me and then at Clete. “I thought you were holding down things in New Iberia.”
“I had enough of the mosquitoes and humidity for a while,” he said.
Alafair looked at me again, then back at Butterworth. “Would you like to join us?”
“I didn’t mean to crash in on you,” he said.
“Sit down,” I said to him.
“Change of attitude?” he said. “Saw a revelation in the sky, that kind of thing?”
“I’m suspended from the department,” I said. “You’re safe.”
He pulled up a chair and fingered his chin. The skin on his face and his shaved head looked as tight as latex on a mannequin. “Could I ask why?”
“The sheriff likes to flush out the place on occasion,” I said. “Kind of like a reverse affirmative-action program.”
“Nothing to do with us, the California infidels?” he said.
“No, it has everything to do with me,” Clete said. “I cut slack to an escaped convict. Dave didn’t report me, so he took my weight. Know who Hugo Tillinger is?”
“Saw his picture in the paper. Man who burned up his wife and daughter,” Butterworth said. “Charming fellow, I’m sure. You say you turned him loose?”
“That’s the kind of thing I do,” Clete said. He was on his fourth Heineken. “I screw up things. You ever do that? Screw up things?”
“We all have our special talents,” Butterworth said.
“See, what bugs me is Tillinger was buds with a former Aryan Brotherhood member named Travis Lebeau, a guy who got chain-dragged on Old Jeanerette Road,” Clete said. “See, the AB might have been mixed up with a bad sheriff’s deputy who was pimping off some local working girls that maybe some Hollywood guys would dig as a change of pace. Know what I’m saying?”
“That’s enough, Clete,” Alafair said.
“It’s okay, isn’t it, fellow?” Clete said to Butterworth. “You guys float in and take a dip in the local pond, then head back to Malibu. Splish-splash.”
“Cool your jets, Clete,” I said.
“My bad,” he said, still talking to Butterworth. “That’s an expression you guys started. Samuel Jackson says it in a film, then all the locals are saying it. You guys have a big influence on Hicksville, did you know that?”
“Let’s go, Alf,” I said, getting up.
“Don’t bother,” Butterworth said. “I’ll be running along. Oh, look. Des seems to have found another dancing partner. My, my, and yum, yum.”
Desmond and Bailey Ribbons were waltzing in a wide circle. All the other dancers had left the floor, maybe realizing, as I did, that Des and Bailey had become Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs waltzing in the exaggerated fashion of frontier people in My Darling Clementine. In fact, the band had gone into the song; I didn’t know if they had been told to do so. I felt as though I had stepped into the film, [[p158]]but not in a good way. I should have been witnessing a tribute to a seminal moment in the history of film and the American West, but instead, Desmond’s drunkenness, the inscrutability of his eyes, the rawness of his half-clothed body, were all like a violation of a sacred space, one that had been hollowed out of a vast burial ground.
Alafair pulled on my arm. “Come on, Dave. Finish your supper.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m just a little off my feed today.”
But the moment wasn’t over. Bailey and Desmond sat down with their friends, and someone fired up a fatty and passed it. When it was Bailey’s turn, she leaned forward and took a toke, then passed it on, laughing as she exhaled. I dropped my napkin on the table and went to my room.
Fifteen minutes later, Bailey was at my door.
“What’s the haps?” I said.
“I was going to talk with you, but you stormed off,” she replied.
“Long day. I’m on the bench.”
“May I come in, or should I just stand here in the hall?”
I stepped aside and let her in. I could smell her perfume as she passed me. I closed the door.
“What do you mean, ‘on the bench’?”
“Helen has me on suspension without pay.”
“For what?”
“Dereliction of duty, I suspect. I held back information to keep Clete Purcel out of trouble.”
“Why are you angry with me?”
“Who said I was?”
“You’re filling the room with it right now.”
“You were smoking weed.”
“Clete Purcel doesn’t?”
“He’s not a cop. If you show contempt for your shield, why should anyone else respect it?”
Her face was tight, her eyes burning with anger, the rim of her nostrils white. “I didn’t know I could give you such discomfort.”
“It’s not about me. You took an oath. We set the standard or we don’t. If we don’t, dirty cops like Axel Devereaux do.”
“I won’t be an embarrassment to you again.”
“Are you going to throw in with these guys?” I said.
“Throw in with them? I’m going to have a small part in the film: a union woman who was at the Ludlow Massacre. Why are you talking to me like this?”
I thought more of you. “I read the book. It’s not a small part. You become the lifelong companion of a Texas Ranger who put John Wesley Hardin in jail.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re ashamed of me.”
I went to the window and opened the curtains and gazed at the buttes in the distance. The heat lightning had died, and the heavens were bursting with stars. I was sure the trail that Henry Fonda had followed into the buttes was still there, stretching over the edge of the earth, teasing us into tomorrow and the chance to build the life we should have had. I felt the room tilt under my feet. When I turned around, Bailey Ribbons was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
I FLEW HOME IN the morning on a commercial flight, although I could sorely afford the cost. The next day I called Helen and the head of Internal Affairs and left messages saying I was at their disposal. Then I sat in the silence of the kitchen and stared at the leaves dropping from the oaks in the backyard. It felt strange to be home alone in the middle of the workday, separated from my profession and all the symbols of my identity: my badge, the cruiser that was always available for me, the deference and respect that came from years of earning the trust of others. I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered whom I was about to become.
That afternoon I walked downtown and across the drawbridge and into the park and sat by myself at a picnic table next to the softball diamond. The park was empty, the grass blown with tiny pieces of leaves chopped up by the mower, a plastic tarp stretched across the swimming pool. At dusk I walked back home and passed people on the bridge whom I did not know and who did not respond to my greeting. Clete would not return from Arizona until the next day, and Alafair was staying on with Desmond until the weekend. I fed Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon, then showered and shaved and dressed in a pair of pressed slacks and a Hawaiian shirt I let hang over my belt. Rain was falling out of the sky, which seemed turned upside down, like a barrel of dark water with stars inside it. I put on a rain hat and drove to the club on the bayou where the blues weren’t just music but a way of life.
• • •
BELLA DELAHOUSSAYE WAS singing a song by a Lafayette musician named Lazy Lester. Inside the din, the only line I could make out was Don’t ever write your name on the jailhouse wall. I sat at the end of the bar in the shadows and ordered a chicken barbecue sandwich and a 7Up with a lime slice. Ten minutes later, a heavyset man spun the stool next to me as though announcing his presence, then sat on it, a cloud of nicotine and dried sweat whooshing out of his clothes. “I think they fucked you, Robicheaux.”
His head had the dimensions of a football, swollen in the center and tapered at the top and the chin. His small mouth was circled with salt-and-pepper whiskers he clipped daily. When he spoke, his mouth looked both bovine and feral. His name was Frenchie Lautrec. He ordered a shot and a water back. Before joining the department, he was a brig chaser in the Crotch and a bondsman. He was also a longtime friend of Axel Devereaux.
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “So who fucked me?”
“The Queen Bitch, Helen Soileau. Who else?”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“No problem. I still think she stuck it to you. What are you drinking?”
My glass was half empty. “Nothing.”
“You staying off the hooch?”
“What are you after, Frenchie?”
“I hear IA has got you by the short hairs. You been over the line too many times. I heard the prick running your case say it.”
“Who’s the prick running my case?”
“I’m trying to cut you a break, Robicheaux. You need some help, maybe a job, a little income, I’m here. That’s what old school is about. We take care of each other.”
“I’ll get by.”
“I admire that. But if you need a gig, let me know.”
“Doing what?”
“Greasing the wheels.”
“What kind of wheels?”
“This is the Cajun Riviera, right? Use your imagination.”
“Maybe I’ll get back to you.”
“That’s the spirit.” He hit me on the back and got up from the stool. “If you want a little action, it’s on the house. Know what I’m saying?”
I watched him walk away, his shoulders humped, his hands knotting and unknotting. I finished my sandwich and ordered another
7Up. After her set, Bella Delahoussaye sat down next to me. “That guy who was here, you hang around wit’ him?” she said.
“I worked with him.”
Her gaze went away from me, then came back. “What do you mean, you did?”
“I’m suspended without pay. That means canned.”
“What for?”
“Screwing up,” I said. “You want a drink?”
“You shouldn’t be here, baby.”
“How am I going to listen to you sing?”
“You know what I mean. You ain’t supposed to be around the wrong kind of liquids.”
“What do you know about Frenchie Lautrec?”
She twisted a strand of hair around her finger. She touched the scar that circumscribed half her neck and looked down the row of faces at the bar. “Walls got ears.”
“What time you get off?” I said.
“Like you don’t know. I ain’t giving you an excuse to sit at a bar. Go home. Don’t get yourself in no trouble.”
I smiled at her. She squeezed my thigh and went back on the stage. She hung her guitar on her neck and gazed into the shadows. “Mean and lean, down and dirty, y’all. I’m talking about the blues.”
• • •
I KNOCKED ON HER door in St. Martinville at ten the next morning. She opened the door, a bandana on her head. “My favorite boogie-woogie man from la Louisiane.”
“Thought I’d take you to breakfast,” I said.
She looked out at the street. “Ain’t nobody followed you?”
“Why would anybody follow me?”
She pulled me inside and closed the door. “Frenchie Lautrec and Axel Devereaux was running the working girls. Now Devereaux is dead, and Frenchie got it all.”
“Prostitution?”
“Boy, you right on it.”
“It can’t be that big.”
“They got girls get five hundred a night, some up to a thousand. Most of the johns are in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Frenchie’s got a plane.”
Her living room was tiny, the doorways hung with beads, an ancient Victrola
against a wall, the couch and stuffed chairs maroon and purple and tasseled, incense burning in a cup on the coffee table. Bella wore sandals and jeans and an oversize Ragin’ Cajuns T-shirt and a gold chain around one ankle, a charm balanced on the top of her foot. I could smell ham and eggs cooking in the kitchen.
“Sit down. I got something to ax you,” she said.
“Sure.”
“I got a son in Angola. He’s just a li’l-bitty boy. One of the wolves put him on the stroll.”
“What’s he down for?”
“Murder. During a robbery, him and another guy. The other guy pulled the trigger, but it didn’t matter. I went to see Harold two days ago. He cain’t hardly walk. That what the wolves are doing to him. They don’t use no grease, nothing.”
“I can make a call.”
She nodded and put a Kleenex to her nose as though she had a cold. She went into the kitchen. I followed her and sat at a table by the window.
“I got enough for two here,” she said.
There was a live oak in the backyard, a broken swing hanging from a limb, an alleyway strewn with trash and spiked with banana plants. “I already ate,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to go to breakfast.”
“Not really.”
“You just wanted to pump me about Frenchie Lautrec.”
“No. You’re nice to talk to.”
There was a beat. She worked the spatula in the frying pan, her back to me. “How long your wife been dead?”
“Three years.”
“Ain’t been nobody else?”
“No.”
She put a piece of browned toast and a cup of coffee in front of me. She filled her own plate and sat down across from me. “I got to say this: I was raised up to believe a redbird don’t sit on a blackbird’s nest.”
“That’s what white people taught your ancestors, then forgot their own admonition. I saw the chain on your ankle. What kind of charm is that?”
The New Iberia Blues Page 16
