The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

• • •

  I HAD LUNCH WITH Clete at Victor’s and told him of Bailey’s visit. His eyes roamed around the room as though the earth were shifting. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  “I’m just quoting what Bailey said.”

  “There are two types of broads who get involved with old guys: gold diggers and basket cases who don’t mind sleeping with mummies or guys in adult diapers.”

  People at the next table turned and stared.

  “Will you lower your voice?” I said.

  “When you stop lying to yourself,” he said.

  “She was trying to be kind.”

  “What, you’re a charity case?”

  I didn’t try to argue. My behavior and thinking were foolish, and I knew it.

  “We’re simpatico?” he said. “All thoughts about boom-boom with the wrong woman out of your head?”

  The people at the next table moved.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. I don’t know what you’d do if I weren’t around.” He rubbed his eyes, his face tired. “Know what the real problem is? You hear the clock ticking. You want to go out like a Roman candle instead of dripping into a can.”

  I had just started on my dessert. I put my spoon down.

  “You mentioned Little Nicky Scarfo,” he said. “There’s a guy I want to talk to on that subject.”

  “Which guy?”

  “Remember Cato Carmouche?”

  “The midget who got fired out of a circus cannon into a steel pole?”

  “Eat up and let’s boogie,” he said.

  • • •

  ACADIANA, LIKE NEW Orleans, is filled with eccentrics, primarily because it has never been fully assimilated into the United States. It’s a fine place to be an artist, a writer, an iconoclast, a bohemian, or a drunk. Some Cajuns are virtually unintelligible to outsiders, yet nurse their accent and inverted sentence structure and forget the outside world. If you wish, anonymity is only a boat ride away. The Atchafalaya Basin is the largest wetland and swamp in the United States. With the purchase of a houseboat, you can live in places that have no name because they didn’t exist yesterday and can be gone tomorrow.

  Modernity has always been our undoing. Our ancestors were farmers and fisher people expelled from Canada by the British in 1755. Unlettered and pacifist in nature and unable to understand the clash of empires, the Acadians wandered for years before they found a home on Bayou Teche. Maybe for that reason, we have a greater tolerance for others who are different or who have been collectively rejected. The disposition and mind-set of Acadiana is little different from those of San Francisco. Maybe that’s why Cato Carmouche lived on a houseboat on the bayou south of Jeanerette, in violation of any number of state and parish regulations.

  Most Cajuns don’t like to travel. Many will admit they have never been out of the state. Not Cato. He hooked up with a circus and became a human cannonball, until the night the cannon was slanted too high and Cato was sent flying over the net into the audience.

  When he came out of a six-week coma, he discovered that his brain had taken on a facility with numbers no one could explain. He could process percentages and numerical probabilities as fast as a computer. One week after he was released from the hospital, he flew to Atlantic City. Then to Reno and Vegas and Puerto Rico. Cato found paradise in the glitter and cheapness and garish mix of fountains splashing with colored lights and the air-conditioned stink of cigarette smoke. The dice jumping across the felt, the coins rattling in the slots, the snap of a card on the blackjack table, the women whose breasts bulged from their evening gowns, the smell of fine liquor, the ball bouncing inside the roulette wheel—where had these gifts been all his life? At four-feet-one, with a scar like a lightning bolt on his shaved head, he stood or sat at the gaming tables and let the blessings of a meretricious deity shower down on him.

  For the first six months on the circuit, he kept his wins low. Then he got greedy at Harrah’s and went into the Griffin Book. Not to be undone, Cato hired on with the casinos and sat with the brass and monitored the eye in the sky and identified the grifters and card counters who thought they knew every hustle in the game. By anyone’s standards, Cato became well-to-do and could have lived anywhere. Instead he came back to Southwest Louisiana and lived by himself on a houseboat painted with the green and purple colors of Mardi Gras and bedecked with glass beads that tinkled in the breeze.

  “How’s it hanging, Cato?” Clete said as we walked across the reinforced plank onto the houseboat.

  “It’s hanging very nicely, t’anks,” Cato said. “How about yours?”

  Cato always had a scrubbed look, and took meticulous care with his clothes and hair, the part as exact as a ruler, each oiled strand a gleaming piece of wire. His voice sounded like it came out of a tin box with gears and springs inside. His eyes were tiny lumps of coal. For some reason he reminded me of Desmond Cormier, as though they shared a similar loneliness, the kind that is usually the fate of the artistically talented.

  “What can I do for youse gentlemen?”

  “ ‘Youse’?” Clete said.

  “I spent a lot of time in Jersey.”

  “We know your history with the casino industry, Mr. Cato,” I said. “We’re wondering about the funding for a motion picture group.”

  “Go ahead and ax me your questions,” he said. “And you don’t got to call me mister, either.”

  His houseboat was moored in the shade of an oak. A cheap rod and reel was propped against the deck rail, the bobber and line floating in an S next to the lily pads in the shallows.

  “We hear Desmond Cormier is being financed by the gaming industry,” I said.

  “Gaming it is not. Getting soaked it is,” Cato said.

  “You got some information for us, sir?” I said.

  “Jersey money is Jersey money. The tracks are full of it. Some of it is hot, some not. The track and the casino are the washeterias. I got to check my line. Then I got to shower and change. A lady friend is picking me up, if you know what I mean, no crudeness intended here.”

  Clete looked at me, clearly trying not to laugh.

  “Did you know a woman named Lucinda Arceneaux?” I asked.

  “The name is not familiar.” Cato pulled his bobber and small lead weight and baited hook from the water and swung them to a different spot.

  “She was murdered, Mr. Cato.”

  “I call other people mister, but I don’t ax the same of them. Know why that is?”

  “Afraid not,” I said.

  “Because people who need titles need somebody else to tell them they’re worth something. No judgment intended.”

  “You hear anything about Arab investments around here?” I said.

  “I have to confess I haven’t seen no A-rabs of recent. You’re talking about people who ride camels?”

  “That doesn’t really answer the question,” I said.

  He looked at his watch. It was gold, the size of a half dollar, inlaid with jewels. “Can I get you gentlemen coffee or a drink before my lady friend comes? It’s fixing to rain. That means the goggle-eye perch gonna be biting soon.”

  “Thanks for your time, Cato,” I said.

  “Yes, suh. It was very nice of youse to come by.”

  I walked back on the plank with Clete, then paused under the tree. “Wait here a minute, will you?”

  “Whatever he knows, he’s keeping it to himself. Let it go,” Clete said.

  “Be right back.”

  I crossed back onto the houseboat. Cato was sitting in a folding canvas chair. The sky had darkened, and I could hear thunder in the distance and feel the barometer dropping and smell the fish bunching up under the lily pads. A big gar rolled as smoothly as a serpent by a flooded canebrake.

  “I need to share something with you,” I said. “Up the bayou, under a big oak like that one on the shore, I caught my first fish when I was seven years old.”

  I paused. Cato gazed at the lightning striking silently i
n a sky that was like purple velvet. The air was damp and sweet and heavy with the smell of sugarcane and the bayou at high tide.

  “This is a special place,” I said. “Guys like us remember the way it used to be. But a lot of bad guys got their hands on us, Cato.”

  “I know what you mean, suh.”

  “Why’d you come back to South Louisiana?”

  “I ain’t lost nothing in them other places.”

  “Desmond is tight with the casino guys?”

  “They go back. Desmond grew up on the Chitimacha Reservation.”

  “Is somebody making a big move?”

  “It’s about money from overseas. Laundering, that kind of t’ing. Politicians are mixed up in it. It’s stuff I don’t want to know about.”

  “Who are the players?”

  He looked up at me. “You better not have no truck with them, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Call me Dave. Why should I not have any truck with them?”

  “I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dol’ars. You know what people will do for that kind of money? Not just here, anywhere. Them A-rabs didn’t invent greed and the mean t’ings people can do.”

  He reeled in his line, his gaze fixed on the sky, and refused to speak again, even to say goodbye.

  • • •

  I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED the dead roam the earth for many years after we try to weigh them down with stones. I also believe they outnumber us. For that reason I’ve never quarreled with the notion that they enter and try to shape our lives in order to redeem their own. So I was not surprised by the vision I had when I looked out my bedroom at three a.m. the day after my visit with Cato Carmouche.

  The clouds of fog on the bayou were as white as cotton, bumping along the ground between the trees, a tug working its way toward the drawbridge, running lights on, glistening with mist. The figure was no more than five-four; he looked made of sourdough. The roundness of his face and limbs and stomach and soft buttocks seemed sketched by an artist. His mouth was a slice of watermelon, his hair as wispy as corn silk.

  I wanted to believe I was watching an apparition, a wandering soul trying to unshackle the fetters of the grave and reclaim the coolness and oxygenated vibrancy of the air that the quick take for granted. I knew better, though. I had seen the figure before. I put my hand under my mattress and retrieved the army-issue 1911-model .45 automatic I had bought for twenty-five dollars in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. I slipped on my khakis and loafers and went through the kitchen into the mudroom. The sky was clear above the fog bank, the tops of the trees lit by the moon. I stepped into the yard. The figure moved behind an oak that was three feet across.

  “Is that you, Smiley?” I asked.

  There was no reply.

  “You gave me quite a start,” I said. “I hope one of us is dreaming.”

  The wind gusted through the trees, giving second life to the raindrops on the leaves, filling the air with the tannic smell of autumn and gas and nightshade in a forest that seldom saw sunlight.

  “I hope you’re not mad at me,” I said. “It was never personal.”

  “Please don’t come any nearer to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” the figure said. His voice had a lisp, a discomfiting wet one, like that of an oversize child nursing.

  “I know it’s you, partner,” I said. “Tell me what you’re doing here. It’ll make us both feel better.”

  “You made me do things I didn’t want to,” he said.

  “You killed a female detective. A good woman who didn’t deserve to die.”

  “That is not true. People were shooting at me. I did not ever aim in the woman’s direction. Do not make up stories.”

  “She died just the same. Do you want me to call you Chester or Smiley?”

  “My friends call me Smiley. But if you’re not my friend, call me something else.”

  “You need to leave the area,” I said. “Then all this will be just a dream.”

  “I’ll leave when my work is done.”

  “What is your work?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You get even for people who can’t defend themselves,” I said. “That’s a noble mission, Smiley. But you need to move on. Maybe back to Florida. Work on your tan.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “I know better.”

  I was sweating inside my clothes. Smiley’s real name was Chester Wimple. He had no category. Not even a partial one. In a harsh light his body seemed to take on the translucence and flaccidity of a jellyfish. He sounded like Elmer Fudd and ate Ding Dongs for breakfast and Eskimo Pies and Buster Bars around the clock. He had done hits with an ice pick on a New York subway and in the box seats of a racetrack and at a chamber of commerce meeting in New Jersey. He had never spent one day in jail.

  I heard his feet move in the leaves. I held up my weapon so it silhouetted in the moonlight. I released the magazine and stuck it into my pocket, then ejected the chambered round, letting it fall on the grass. “I’m no threat to you, Smiley. I’m suspended from the sheriff’s department. I’m going to walk toward you now. Is that okay?”

  The wind died. The leaves on the trees were as still as stamped metal. I walked toward the place where Smiley had been standing; the fog enveloped the lower half of my body. I saw a pirogue glide away from the bank, a solitary man seated and stroking evenly in the stern. He waved goodbye without turning around, as though he knew I would follow him to the water’s edge but offer no more protest about his presence in Acadiana.

  I could hear myself breathing in the dark.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE SUN CAME up like thunder, a yellowish bloodred in the smoke of a runaway stubble fire. I did not tell Alafair or Clete about my encounter with Smiley, in part because they would think me unhinged. Also I did not trust my own perceptions. For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.

  I did make a call to a former CIA agent I knew from the program. His name was Walter Scanlon. For forty years he pickled his brain and liver with a fifth of vodka every night while he moved like a threadworm through the underside of the New American Empire. Now he chain-smoked and attended the “Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker” meeting in New Orleans, sitting silently in the back with a face that looked as old as papyrus and eyes that were the color of raw oysters. Few had any idea of the deeds stored in the basement of his soul.

  “Yeah, Chester Wimple,” he said. “He goes by Smiley or something.”

  “Was he ever one of yours?” I asked.

  “We didn’t use guys like that.”

  “But you’ve run across him? You know about him?”

  “We thought he took out one of our informants in Mexico City. A child molester. No big loss. You didn’t talk to the FBI?”

  “They don’t know much more than we do.”

  “Let me ring a couple of people.”

  He called back that evening. “When’s the last time you had contact with this guy?” he said.

  “I thought I might have seen him earlier today.”

  “Better visit your optometrist. Chester Wimple was blown all over a café with a fifty-cal in Venezuela eight months ago.”

  “Must be a mistake.”

  “The guys I got this from use DNA.”

  “I appreciate your time,” I said, my mouth dry. “How you doing with the program?”

  “I haven’t slept since the fall of Saigon,” he replied. “Thanks for bringing it up.”

  • • •

  AT SEVEN-THIRTY THE next morning Helen Soileau was at my door.

  “What’s the haps?” I said through the screen.

  “Need to get you on the clock,” she said. “I killed the IA beef. How about it, Pops?”

  I pushed the screen open. “Come in
.” I let her walk ahead of me into the kitchen. I took the Silex carafe and two cups off the counter and sat down at the breakfast table. “Why the change of heart?”

  “I was wrong,” she replied.

  “I held back information I should have reported.”

  “And done Texas’s dirty work for them. I probably wouldn’t have dimed Tillinger either.” She took my badge out of her coat pocket and set it on the table. It was gold and inset with blue letters.

  “Something hit the fan?” I said.

  “I need every swinging dick on the line.”

  “You know how to say it, Helen.”

  “In or out?”

  I palmed my badge but didn’t put it into my pocket. “I had a visitor in the early a.m. yesterday. Chester Wimple, alias Smiley.”

  “He was just passing through on his way to killing someone?”

  “He was standing under the trees in the backyard. He left in a pirogue.”

  “I don’t want to listen to this,” she said.

  “It gets worse. I called a friend who was CIA for forty years. He says Smiley was shredded into dog food by a fifty-caliber eight months ago.”

  “I don’t know which story is worse, yours or your friend’s.”

  “Take it any way you want. I told Smiley he was unwelcome. I unloaded my weapon in front of him. I watched him paddle his pirogue down to the drawbridge. The CIA isn’t made up of stupid people.”

  I saw the heat go out of her face.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Maybe it explains something.”

  “Explains what?”

  “We’ve got another homicide.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You and Clete did what you could. There are people you can’t help, Dave.”

  “Cut the doodah, Helen. Who are we talking about?”

  She tapped the table with her knuckles and lifted her gaze to mine. Her eyes were damp. “Fuck me.”

  • • •

  HELEN’S HARD-CORE PERSONA was often cosmetic and disguised the humanity that defined her. That said, the scene inside Hilary Bienville’s trailer was the kind no cop wants to see. It was the kind that forces you to re-create the suffering and fear of the victim; it also installs itself in your memory and becomes the catalyst for your first hit of Jack that night and the images you’ll drag like a chain the rest of your days.