The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “Are you too tired to go to Opelousas?” I said.

  “What’s in Opelousas?”

  “The past.”

  “Let’s go,” Bailey said.

  I could see the fatigue in her face, a deadness in her eyes. Neither of us had mentioned my leaving her house yesterday after she had probably spent half the day preparing for my arrival.

  “We’ve done enough for today,” I said. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “I’d better go home.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Let’s keep it professional from here on out,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  I felt a crack spread across my heart.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE NEXT MORNING I found Ennis Patout’s name in the Opelousas phone directory. I checked out a cruiser, and Bailey and I drove to St. Landry Parish. The morning was clear and cool, the grass in the neutral ground mowed and sparkling with dew. As we neared Opelousas, I looked across the seat at her and said, “A good night’s sleep is the cure for lots of things, isn’t it?”

  She smiled and didn’t reply.

  I turned off at the exit and drove to an old two-story soot-stained stucco building on the two-lane to Baton Rouge. It had been a car dealership during the Depression and was now a wrecker service and repair shop for diesel trucks. The gas pumps in front were out of order and rusted. I had called Patout before we left New Iberia; when I’d identified myself, he’d hung up. A black man in a filthy white jumpsuit was working on an engine in the shop.

  “Is Mr. Patout here?” I said.

  “Upstairs. What you want?”

  I opened my badge holder. “I called earlier. Ask him to come down.”

  “He ain’t gonna like it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Mr. Ennis don’t need a reason.” He went up a wooden staircase inside the shop and came back down. “He’ll be down in a minute. He’s got to take his heart medicine.”

  A moment later, a towering man emerged from the doorway that led to the stairs. He had the same wide-set pale blue eyes as Desmond, and the same long upper lip and the same muscularity, but that was where the similarity ended. His face made me think of a broken pumpkin. The eyes were out of alignment, the blank stare like a slap. There was a repressed ferocity in his stance. His hands were grimed and hung at his sides. His jumpsuit was dirtier than the black man’s. From five feet away he had an odor like a barrel of old shrimp.

  “I’m Detective Robicheaux,” I said. “This is Detective Ribbons. I called you from New Iberia.”

  He didn’t look at Bailey. “I know who you are.” Even though he had a French name, he had a deep-throated Mississippi or North Louisiana accent.

  “We’re looking for an escaped convict named Hugo Tillinger,” I said. “We have reason to believe he might try to contact you.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s heard of you,” Bailey said. “Your name and city of residence were in his notebook.”

  “Tillinger, you say?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “He was convicted of burning his family to death.”

  “What’s he want with me?”

  There are many ruses police can use legally in interrogating a witness or suspect, and one of the most effective is to indicate you posses knowledge that in reality you don’t. “I think he wants to talk to you about your son, Desmond Cormier.”

  “Who says I got a son?”

  “It’s a matter of record,” I said. “You took the baby to Charity Hospital in Lafayette many years ago. You probably saved his life. You never see Desmond? He’s a famous man.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “This is about her, ain’t it? She’s back telling lies.”

  “Could be,” I said, with no clue about the reference. “Why not give us your perception of the situation and put it to rest?”

  “She’s a drunk and a whore,” he said. “I was good to her when nobody else was. She slept with everything that wore pants. I caught her a bunch of times, but I never hit her.”

  “We’re talking about Corina Cormier, right?” I said.

  “Who’s it sound like?”

  “Where can we find her?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He was looking at Bailey now. “If she’s alive, she’s probably a hag. The man that slept with her had to tie a board across his ass so he didn’t fall in, and that was forty years back.”

  “You need to dial down the language, Mr. Patout,” I said.

  “Don’t you lecture me, boy,” he said. “In fact, it’s time for you to git. I got work to do.”

  “Git?” I said.

  “This is St. Landry Parish. You got no authority here. Come back with a warrant or stay the hell away from me. That means you drag your sorry asses out of here.”

  There are times you hold your ground, and there are times you walk away. In this instance we were off our turf. There was another factor involved. Patout was not the kind you took down easily. He was the kind you sometimes ended up killing.

  His hands still hung at his sides, curled like an ape’s, the nails half-mooned with dirt and grease. “Why you staring at me?”

  I could feel my old enemy flickering to life like a flame working its way up a cornstalk in late summer. “See you down the road,” I said.

  I winked at him. It was a poor mask for our defeat at the hands of an ignorant and obviously violent man. We got back into the cruiser and drove away.

  • • •

  “SEE YOU DOWN the road?” Bailey said.

  I didn’t reply. One mile down the road, she said, “Turn around.”

  “What for?” I replied.

  “Either you turn around or I’ll get out and walk.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “Then stop the car.”

  The flasher was already on. I U-turned in the middle of the two-lane and drove back to Patout’s wrecker service. Bailey and I got out at the same time. Patout was inside the shop, under a truck hood. He lifted his head. “What now?”

  “You see this?” Bailey said.

  “Your badge?” he said.

  “It’s not just a badge. It’s a symbol of honor and integrity. You will respect it. You will not use profanity in speaking to an officer of the law, and you will not tell him or her what you will and will not do. And you will never again disrespect anyone from our parish who carries this badge. That starts with calling an adult ‘boy.’ ”

  His eyes shifted on mine. “She for real?”

  “Why don’t you man up and apologize?” I said.

  “All right,” he said.

  “All right, what?” I said.

  “I apologize. You come at me hard. I ain’t up to it. I got a bad heart and a bad temper. Don’t pay me no mind. How’s Desmond doing?”

  “Go ask him,” Bailey said.

  “I doubt he’d want that.”

  “Give it a try,” Bailey said.

  “I’ve thought about it,” he said. He stared at the concrete floor, his eyes empty, his emotions, whatever they were, as dead as wet ash. “What’s done is done. There ain’t no changing it. He was a good little boy. I always miss that little boy. Cain’t get him out of my head sometimes.”

  • • •

  AFTER LUNCH I talked to Helen in her office.

  “So Hugo Tillinger is running around naked without his truck, and Smiley could be anywhere, and y’all’s interview with Desmond Cormier’s father was a dead end?”

  “I don’t see it that way,” I said. “Tillinger is a smart guy. If he’s digging around in Desmond’s family, it’s for a reason.”

  Helen was standing by the window. “Come here.”

  I walked behind her desk and stood next to her.

  “Look across the bayou,” she said. “Those people picnicking under the shelters and children flying kites on the baseball diamond have no idea what the world is really like. Can you imagine showing any of them a pho
tograph of Axel Devereaux with the baton shoved down his throat? Or Hilary Bienville torn apart? Or what some of Smiley’s victims looked like?”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” I said.

  “You’re not hearing me. I’m saying a black flag has its purpose.”

  “It’s not a good one, either,” I said.

  “This from you? Stop it.”

  “It’s a mistake to create a mystique about these murders,” I said.

  “They’re just regular meat and potatoes?”

  “I’m saying they’re about money.”

  “That’s what you want to believe. You know better.”

  I looked at my watch. “I’d better get on it. Anything else?”

  “You and Bailey getting along?”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “You deserve a good life, bwana.”

  “Could you translate that for me?”

  Her gaze dropped to my chest and arms. I was wearing a white dress shirt and a tie.

  “You have too much starch in your shirts,” she said. “You ought to switch your laundry service. Loosen up. Go with the flow.”

  “Adios,” I said.

  • • •

  HELEN WAS BEING invasive about my sex life in part because hers was so outrageous, but I was glad she had changed the subject from a discussion that no cop likes. Here’s the truth about the profession I have served most of my adult life: There are uncomfortable moments for almost all cops. The struggles are similar to those of the mystic with doubt about God’s existence; the lover who looks into the eyes of a companion after orgasm and sees only disinterest and an uncoupling of the spirit; or the humanist who watches a neighbor whip a child savagely in the yard. If a cop is on the job long enough, he will see things he never discusses with anyone, not unless he is afflicted with the same psychological disorders that define the sociopaths he locks up. The moment I’m describing, the one that happens in the middle of the night, when the booze and weed and pills aren’t working anymore, is the realization that real evil is not simply a product of environmental factors. It may be a disembodied presence floating from place to place, seeking to drop its tentacles into whatever host it can find.

  What are its origins? I don’t know. Charles Manson and his kind are harlequins and poseurs. Anyone who wants to check out the collective nature of evil can take a photo tour of Hitler’s extermination camps and decide whether William Blake’s tiger is out there or not.

  • • •

  LATER THAT SAME day, Smiley Wimple was sitting in a Morgan City Laundromat, reading a Wonder Woman comic, when two men came in the front door. He had not seen them before, but he knew their kind. Their tight suits had a liquid shine; they wore hairstyles and sideburns that were thirty years out of fashion; they stank of pomade and deodorant and made Smiley think of walking chemical factories. They always had cigarettes either in their mouths or cupped in their hands, as though they were fire dragons, the inventors of flame, a fiery force that caused people to melt like wax from their heat. Their eyes ate up the scenery and the people in it. Their meters were always running, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.

  The two men walked straight to Smiley’s chair. He was wearing a safari hat and Ray-Bans. He peered over the top of the comic like a smiling angel-food cake. “Hi, hi,” he said.

  “Come with us,” one of the men said. His black mustache had gray hair and tiny pieces of food in it.

  “I was taught not to talk to strangers, even though they might be nice.”

  “That’s us. Nice,” the same man said. When he grinned, the skin around his mouth looked shriveled, like it was rubber or it wouldn’t work right.

  “My friends call me Smiley, although my real name is Chester.”

  “Yeah, we know that,” the same man said. “My name is Jerry Gee. You don’t remember us from Miami?”

  “I’m from New Or-yuns.”

  “Great city,” Jerry Gee said. “They got, what-do-you-call-’em, beignets that melt in your mouth. The broads the same way. Whatcha reading?”

  The clothes in the dryers were spinning and falling, buttons clicking against metal, cloth toppling across the glass, like living creatures inside a bathysphere that had broken from its cable. The air smelled baked and clean and comfortable, like a womb Smiley didn’t want to leave. He dropped his eyes to his comic. Wonder Woman was deflecting bullets with her magic bracelets.

  “Hey, you hearing me?” Jerry Gee said.

  “I’m reading about Wonder Woman.”

  “Yeah? She’s a chunk, huh?” Jerry Gee said.

  “Don’t be disrespectful of her,” Smiley said.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I dig her, too,” Jerry Gee said. His dark hair glistened with oil, one strand hanging through an eyebrow, an impish working-class kid out of a 1930s Bowery Boys film. “There’s a fat envelope for you in our car. It’s from a mutual friend.”

  “Then we can have some lunch,” the second man said. He was taller than the other man and wore his shirt lapels outside his suit, exposing his chest hair. There were rings on his fingers inset with stones, more like brass knuckles than jewelry. “My name is Marco. Like Marco Polo. After we have lunch, we’ll come back and help you fold your clothes.”

  Smiley rolled his comic and sat with his hands clamped between his thighs. “I have to go wee-wee.”

  “We’ll go with you. To watch the bathroom door,” Jerry Gee said. He leaned down. “This place is full of cannibals, man. You ought to find a better part of town.”

  Smiley squeezed his penis. “I’m going to wet myself.”

  “Go. By all means,” Jerry Gee said, stepping back.

  The men followed Smiley to the restroom and waited outside. Marco combed his hair in a mirror, squatting to get a better view of himself, patting his hair with his free hand. Jerry Gee hit the door with his fist. “Roll up your wiener. There’s people waiting here.”

  The two men laughed without sound.

  “I’m going poop,” Smiley replied through the door.

  “You can take the trash can with you,” Marco said.

  Smiley opened the door. A piece of toilet paper was stuck to his shoe. Marco glanced back into the Laundromat, then shoved Smiley into the alley. “Get in the Buick. We’re gonna have a talk.”

  “No, you made fun of me.”

  Jerry Gee opened the rear door of the Buick. Marco hooked one finger in Smiley’s mouth and slung him inside and climbed in after him. Jerry Gee got behind the wheel, locked the doors, and started the engine. In seconds they were on the four-lane, ascending a bridge that overlooked the Atchafalaya River and miles of flooded woods where frightened egrets lifted into the air like snowflakes blowing in a violent wind.

  • • •

  JERRY GEE DROVE along a levee and parked in a grove of persimmons by a bay. Through the tree trunks, Smiley saw the sunlight blazing on the water and a half-sunken shrimp boat circled by alligator gars that rolled like sea serpents. Jerry Gee got out and opened the back door. He pulled Smiley onto the ground, which was covered with damp yellow leaves that were spotted with black mold. Jerry Gee scooped up a handful and stuffed them into Smiley’s mouth. Smiley gagged and tried to crawl away. Jerry Gee kicked him between the buttocks, then stood on his spine.

  “This is the preview. Don’t make us look at the main feature. You had a job to do, but you didn’t do it. You were supposed to call in with what you learned or clip the guy.”

  Smiley sat up, hiccupping, his eyes cups of grease and dirt. Marco leaned down and slapped him across the ear. “You deaf? Answer the man!”

  Smiley stared at the movements of the gars, the waves washing through the pilothouse of the sunken boat, the persimmons on the ground that were crawling with ants.

  “What’s it take?” Marco said. “You want us to hurt you? I mean really hurt you? I got tools in the trunk you ain’t gonna like.”

  “Get him up,” Jerry Gee said.

  Marco picked up Smiley and began dusting him
off.

  “Against the car,” Jerry Gee said.

  Marco held his hands out palms up, as though to say What?

  “Do it,” Jerry Gee said.

  Marco shoved Smiley over the fender and pushed his face down on the hood, flattening it sideways against the metal, twisting Smiley’s mouth out of shape.

  Jerry Gee picked up a broken tree branch. “I heard you had a bad time in an orphanage and you ended up queer-bait on the streets. So how about a trip down Memory Lane? Get in touch with the origins of your problem?”

  Jerry Gee nodded at Marco. Marco stared back and mouthed, What the fuck?

  “Take his pants down,” Jerry Gee said.

  They were elastic-waisted and slid easily over the knees. Even though the weather was warm, Smiley’s buttocks and thighs prickled.

  “Last chance, Smiley,” Jerry Gee said, teasing Smiley’s butt with the points of the branch.

  “Only my friends call me Smiley. You’re not my friend.”

  “You caused all this,” Jerry Gee said. “So shut up.”

  Smiley felt a pain like a handsaw piercing his rectum and viscera and climbing up his spine and out his mouth.

  When he woke up, he was lying on the ground. The two men were looking down at him; framed against the sun, their faces were lost in shadow.

  “You all right, little buddy?” Marco said.

  Smiley didn’t answer.

  “You gonna be a good boy?” Jerry Gee said.

  “Yes,” Smiley said.

  “What’d you get for us?” Jerry Gee said.

  “The bad man from Texas on my recorder.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  “Because he doesn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t want anybody mad at me.”

  “You should have popped him,” Jerry Gee said.

  “He didn’t kill his family. Someone told me a big fib.”

  “You’re a righteous dude,” Marco said, lifting him to his feet. “Clean yourself up and get in the car. We’ll buy you an ice cream on the way back to your car. Hey, act like a man and stop crying.”

  Smiley’s eyes were swimming. Inside the bronze glaze on the water, he saw a metal shield rise to the surface like a great bubble of air released from the ancient world. A woman clad in a red and gold bodice and metallic-blue shorts sprinkled with stars waded to the shore, a magic rope coiled on her belt. She smiled at him, her eyes filled with the lights of love and pity.