The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “A cross.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “From Hilary Bienville.”

  “Where’d she get it?”

  “Don’t know, didn’t ax. No matter what you say, you ain’t here about me, are you?”

  “I like you and admire you, Miss Bella. Believe what you want.”

  She got up and raked her food into a trash can, then washed the plate in the sink and set it in a drying rack. She leaned on the counter, her face covered with shadow. I stood up and spread my hand on her back. I could feel her breath rising and falling, her heat through the T-shirt, her blood humming.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “No, I ain’t ever gonna be all right. They gonna kill him in there. That li’l boy that never had no daddy and no real mama.” She turned around and took my hand and placed it on the scar on her neck. It felt as firm and thick as a night crawler. “A policeman in New Orleans done that. A black one. I was seventeen. I killed him. I done it with a razor blade. Ain’t nobody ever knowed about it.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “ ’Cause I ain’t never tole nobody. ’Cause my li’l boy is paying for my sin, if it was a sin. I didn’t think it was one at the time.”

  “You’re not a sinful person.”

  She stepped close to me, then buried her face in my shirt and put her arms around me and pressed herself against me. “Hold me.”

  I laid my arms lightly across her back, my inner self rising, an empty space in my thoughts, her fingers digging into my skin.

  “Hold me,” she repeated. “Hold me, please. Oh, Lordy, what am I gonna do about my li’l boy?”

  When I left, I thought I saw a white man in the alley with a camera. His back was turned. He disappeared behind a clump of banana plants. I walked to the alley, but he was gone.

  • • •

  ON FRIDAY, THE following day, Helen Soileau called me at home. “You’re on social media,” she said.

  “I’m not up on that stuff,” I replied. “What are we talking about?”

  “You’re with a black woman. I can’t tell if you’re getting it on or not. Thought you ought to know.”

  “So now I know. Seen any good movies lately?”

  “You’re not bothered?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “Ask people in Internal Affairs,” I said.

  “This isn’t about me, Pops.”

  “Don’t call me Pops anymore.”

  “You and Clete put me in a corner. Quit blaming me because you fucked up.”

  “I don’t blame you. What you don’t understand is I didn’t have an alternative. Clete cut Hugo Tillinger loose because to do otherwise would have sent Tillinger to the injection table. If I reported Clete, he could be charged with aiding and abetting. If I had it to do over again, I’d make the same choice. That means I’ll take my own fall. That means you don’t have to say anything.”

  “I think you’re enjoying this.”

  “I’m tired of other people’s bullshit.”

  “Who do you think took the pictures?”

  “A friend of Axel Devereaux.”

  “Like who?”

  “Maybe it was Madman Muntz.”

  “Who’s Madman Muntz?”

  “Google the name next time you’re playing around on the Internet.”

  I eased the receiver into the phone cradle. She didn’t call back. I waited until after supper, then put a throw-down in the pocket of my khakis and rolled my cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump in a raincoat and placed it on the floor of my truck. I drove to the little settlement of Cade, where Lucinda Arceneaux had grown up as the daughter of a Free Will Baptist preacher who probably never could have guessed his daughter would die upon the symbol of his religion.

  • • •

  I PASSED A TRAILER and a small church with a faux bell tower in a pecan orchard. On a dirt road, behind the remnants of a motel called the Truman, built for colored in the 1940s, was the neat brick house of Frenchie Lautrec, flat-topped and as squat and ugly as a machine-gun bunker. Maybe it was coincidence that Frenchie lived close to the father of Lucinda Arceneaux, a woman who tried to get the innocent off death row. I had no doubt, however, that Frenchie had posted photos of me and Bella Delahoussaye on the Internet and that his agenda was straight out of the pit.

  I parked under the pecan trees and watched the sun descend like an orange globe in the dust; a shadow seemed to crawl across the land. Then I saw the electric lights glowing inside Frenchie’s house. As far as I knew, he was a single man who lived with various women at various times. Most of them were drunks or addicts or battered wives or women he busted for soliciting. They didn’t hang around long, nor did they tell others what he did to them.

  I got out of my truck with the shotgun wrapped in the raincoat, and walked across a coulee on a wood bridge and up the steps of his gallery. I could hear a television in the front room. I banged on the door with the flat of my left fist, the cut-down still in the raincoat hanging from my right hand.

  Frenchie opened the door. He was barefoot and wore a faded long-sleeve flannel shirt; his shoulders were knobbed with muscle, his chest flat like a boxer’s, the veins in his forearms as thick as soda straws. He was smiling. “Just at the right time. I was fixing to call up some pussy. You game?” He pushed the screen wide.

  I stepped inside. “Thanks.”

  I shook the raincoat from the cut-down and slammed the stock across his mouth. I heard his teeth clack against the wood. He crashed against the wall, his lips gushing blood. When he tried to get up, I brought the butt down on his forehead and split the skin at the hairline. He rolled into a ball, his forearms clamped around his ears. I tossed the cut-down on the couch and peeled one arm from his head and mashed his head under my foot.

  The inside of his house looked like a collection of synthetic junk someone had bought at the dollar store. There was even a plastic birdcage with a cloth canary in it.

  “Who else is in the house?” I said. “If you lie, I’m going to crack your skull.”

  “Ain’t nobody here.”

  “Where’s the camera?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  I lifted him to his feet and shoved him across the coffee table, breaking it in half.

  “Eat shit,” he said.

  I lifted him again and threw him through a bedroom door. There was a desk against one wall with a computer and a camera on top. I picked up the camera. “Is this the one you used?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I want to explain something to you. I couldn’t care less if you put photos of me on the Internet. But you did it to an innocent woman and made her an object of scandal and ridicule.”

  “I’m getting up now,” he said, one hand raised in front of him. “I cock-blocked you. You’ll have to find a new knothole. I win, you lose. Now get out of here.”

  “Better stay where you are, Frenchie.”

  “My dick in your ear.”

  I felt my old enemy kick into gear, not unlike a half-formed simian creature breaking the chains from its body. The transformation always began with a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping inside my head; then the world disappeared inside a wave of color that resembled the different shades of a fire raging in a forest. I was now in a place bereft of mercy and charity, drunk on my own adrenaline, the power in my arms and fists of a kind that, in certain people, age does not diminish.

  When I finished hitting him and throwing him against the wall, I dropped his camera on the floor and smashed it into junk. Then I picked up a handful of parts and pushed them into his mouth and stepped on them.

  He began crawling away from me on his hands and knees. Both my hands were bleeding. The wallpaper was splattered with blood.

  “Get up!” I said.

  He didn’t answer. I thought I heard him weeping. Then I realized he was probably choking to death. I dragged him into the bathroom and hung him over the rim of the bath
tub and hit him between the shoulder blades. I could hear the pieces of the camera tinkling in the bottom of the tub. I wet a towel and wiped his face and eased him down on the floor, his back against the wall. His whiskers were bright red, his shirt plastered with blood against his chest.

  I squatted down in front of him. “You want an ambulance?”

  He shook his head.

  “If I was you, I’d call for one,” I said.

  “They’re gonna clean your clock.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “People wit’ big money. More than you can dream about. Axel was gonna tap into it.”

  “Axel Devereaux was into something besides pimping?”

  “Something to do with Arabs and uranium,” he said. He spat a piece of metal off his tongue.

  “This is southern Louisiana. We don’t have Arabs or sand dunes or centrifuges.”

  “I told you what I know. Axel thought he was gonna be in the movies. He got to eat his baton instead. Maybe they’ll do that for you.”

  “The movie people are going to hurt me?”

  “Maybe it’s those guys out of Jersey. The ones backing the casinos. Guys who knew Nicky Scarfo. You think the Indians run their show? The wiseguys wouldn’t wipe their ass on them.”

  “The foster father of Lucinda Arceneaux lives a few hundred yards from here. Did you know her?”

  “Saw her around. She thought her shit didn’t stink.”

  I got to my feet. My knees were weak, my eyes stinging with sweat.

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Did you get into her bread?”

  “Whose bread?”

  “Bella Delahoussaye’s. She fucked my brains out. You ought to give it a try, if you haven’t already.” He was grinning. Two of his teeth were broken off. He spat a clot of blood onto the floor and laughed to himself.

  “I’ve got to give it to you,” I said.

  “For what?” he replied.

  “I never met a worse cop. You give shit a bad name.”

  I filled a water glass that was on the wash basin and placed it in his hand. I stared at him a long time, until he had to look away.

  “What?” he said.

  “I killed Asian men I had nothing against,” I said. “Speak disrespectfully of Miss Bella again, and what happened here tonight will be just a tune-up.”

  I took the glass from his hand and threw the water in his face.

  Chapter Eighteen

  CLETE AND ALAFAIR were both back from Arizona, but I told neither of them about my troubles with Frenchie Lautrec. Clete came to my house Monday night. “I saw Bella Delahoussaye at the Winn-Dixie. She said this creep Lautrec smeared you with some photographs on the Internet. The message was supposed to be racial.”

  “That sounds right,” I replied.

  “What happened?”

  “I dropped by his house.”

  “And did what?”

  “Maybe he swallowed some camera parts. A couple of teeth, too.”

  “He didn’t dime you?”

  “I heard he took sick leave. He’s a dirty cop. He can’t afford to dime anybody.”

  “He photographed you getting it on with Bella?”

  “Her son was being gang-raped at Angola. I tried to comfort her.”

  “Horizontally?” he said.

  We were in the kitchen. It was dark outside. I could see the stars above the park; the trees resembled black cutouts. “Why is your elevator always stuck in the basement, Clete?”

  “Answer the question. Are you getting it on?”

  “No. Lautrec wanted to do some payback for Axel Devereaux. Or maybe he wanted to get me fired so I’d hook up with him.”

  “Pimping?”

  “Who knows? Get this. He says Devereaux knew something about Arab money and uranium. He learned about it through the movie people.”

  “This is from outer space, Dave.”

  “That’s what I told him. He said the Jersey guys might be mixed up in it. Nicky Scarfo’s crowd.”

  “Little Nicky is dead,” Clete said.

  “I know. So forget it.”

  It was quiet in the room. I could hear the tree frogs down on the bayou.

  “You kicked Lautrec’s ass pretty bad?” Clete said.

  “You could say that.”

  “But it wasn’t about the pictures on the Internet, was it?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “Bailey Ribbons let you down?”

  “I had higher expectations of her.”

  “Cut her some slack, for Christ’s sake. How about the women I’ve dated? I’m lucky I haven’t woken up with my throat slit.” He waited for me to reply. “Come in, Earth.”

  “She was smoking dope. With sycophants and frauds.”

  “That’s not the equivalent of original sin,” he said.

  “What say we talk about something else?”

  “Helen’s not going to drop the IA referral?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You’re planning to square all this on your own?”

  “It had crossed my mind.”

  “Can I have one of your diet Docs?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He went to the icebox and popped a can of Dr Pepper. “Mind if I tag along, do oversight, make sure things stay under control?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, Cletus.”

  • • •

  THERE ARE LESSONS you learn in the military or jail or any other institutional situation where survival is dependent on your ability to think more clearly than your enemies or the people around you. Here are a few admonitions from the bottom of the food chain. They can be interpreted literally or metaphorically, depending on the situation.

  1) Don’t silhouette on a hill.

  2) Get rid of your jewelry, particularly civilian junk. Ostentation can put you in a box.

  3) Don’t make enemies with anyone in records.

  4) Don’t threaten anyone who knows your location when you don’t know his.

  5) Never piss off the people who prepare or serve your food.

  6) Be aware that clerks and secretaries run the world and own rubber stamps that can turn your life into a broken pay toilet.

  7) Never sass a hack or drill sergeant or any dull-witted white Southerner who has authority over others.

  8) Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives the bad guys up the wall.

  9) Get the right people on your side. Who would you rather have covering your back in a back-alley brawl, an academic liberal or a hobnailed redneck?

  10) Never buy into the acronym FEAR (fuck everything and run). Swallow your blood and don’t let others know you’re hurt. If that doesn’t work, spit it in their faces.

  11) Even in the most desperate of situations, stay away from the Herd. Situating yourself between loud oinking sounds and the trough is a surefire way to get trampled to death.

  12) Burn this list before anyone catches you with it.

  In my vanity, I wanted to think of myself as a vigilante or, even worse, a knight errant. But I was flailing at the dark. Men like Lautrec and Devereaux were surrogates. The person who’d murdered Lucinda Arceneaux and mounted her on a cross and floated her out to sea was either a master manipulator or someone with motivations that were armor-plated in the unconscious. My badge was in limbo. I had no legal power. How could I proceed in a case that had become a room without doors?

  On Tuesday morning, I was sitting on my back steps with Mon Tee Coon and Snuggs, throwing pecans into a hat, when I heard someone walk through the porte cochere and come around the side of the house. Mon Tee Coon scampered up an oak tree. Bailey Ribbons walked across the grass, her small black shoes crunching on the patina of red and orange and yellow leaves I had not raked up. “Good morning,” she said.

  I stood up. “How you doin’, Bailey?”

  “May I sit down?” She was wearing a dark skirt and a lavender blouse and a gold chain with small heart
charms on it.

  “Let me get you a chair. The steps are dirty.”

  “That’s all right,” she said, sitting down on the steps. She looked up at the oak in front of us. “Did I scare off your coon?”

  “He doesn’t know you yet.”

  “I feel very bad, Dave. I got the stars in my eyes out there in Arizona. I was acting like an idiot. It’s an honor to be your partner.”

  “I wouldn’t get carried away with that,” I said.

  “Look at me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to seem forward.”

  “About what?” I said.

  She picked up my hand in hers. “I don’t want to sit by and watch while you hurt your career. You’re doing things that make no sense, and I think they have something to do with me.”

  “I’m an expert at messing up things on my own.”

  She squeezed my hand, hard. “You listen to me. I’ve worked with cops who should be in cages. We can’t afford to lose people like you.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  She released my hand. “The human race. That’s what it’s about. The good guys against the bad guys. I said that to Desmond. That’s what the last scene in My Darling Clementine is about. Wyatt Earp has a higher destiny.”

  “That scene is about death,” I said.

  She stood up and swiped off her rump. I stood up also. She looked up in my face. “Can I say something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I don’t care about convention.”

  I looked away from her, then back at her face. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t read her expression. I cleared my throat but didn’t speak.

  “I don’t measure people by their age,” she said. “I think those things are stupid. Am I getting through here?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you are,” I said. I picked up my hat and dumped the pecans on the ground, put my hat on my head, then removed it. “Bailey Ribbons. Did I ever tell you I love that name?”

  “I think that is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me,” she replied.

  I heard Mon Tee Coon springing from limb to limb overhead. I wanted to believe the natural world had given me an exemption that people my age do not earn and are seldom granted.