The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Smiley could not fathom the man’s thinking. How could not knowing somebody make killing acceptable? Was Smiley made different in the womb, like the button man? Or was he the sword of justice? If the latter was true, he had to give up all thoughts of himself. That could be a rough go.

  There was still time to leave Purcel to his own fate. Don’t screw it up. Those words may have come from the mouth of a man who stank of salami and red wine and hair tonic, but they were hard to argue with.

  Smiley felt like someone had hammered a nail between his eyes. He drove the stolen pickup in a wide circle around the back of the motel. Eighteen-wheelers were passing on the four-lane, headed for Big D or Little Rock or Baton Rouge or New Orleans. All Smiley had to do was join them. Then he would be back inside the program, safe, taking care of himself again, having a little fun once in a while.

  Just when he thought he had established a moment of serenity in his head, Wonder Woman’s words came back like a slap.

  You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?

  • • •

  A DOOR FAR DOWN the hall on the motel’s second floor opened, and a man pulling a suitcase on wheels came out and walked to the elevator. The four people standing by the security camera walked in separate directions, as though returning to their rooms or duties. The man in the mask stepped inside the fire exit, then returned when the elevator closed. The blond woman got a step ladder from a broom closet and tried to unload the camera but had no success. Six minutes had elapsed since the four people had assembled.

  They approached the door that the man in the mask had pointed at. Then the elevator cables rattled and the wall shook as the elevator stopped on the second floor; the doors slid open. The four people in the hallway stood frozen on either side of the targeted room. No one exited the elevator. The dark-skinned woman who may have been Hispanic walked toward the elevator door, dragging her vacuum behind her. She turned to the others and shook her head. The man in the mask slipped a key card through the lock on the targeted room. The lock made a dry clicking sound. The man in the mask leaned against the door, prepared to burst into the room, his weapon cocked.

  • • •

  SMILEY DID NOT like enclosure, in part because of the closets he’d been locked in at the orphanage. Nor did he like the smell of wet towels and washcloths and sheets and pillowcases soiled with BO and people’s coupling. But any port in a storm, even though it was a smelly one. In each hand he held a custom-made .22 Magnum semi-auto. His heart was dilated with adrenaline, his wee-wee swelling, an odor as heavy as the ocean rising into his nostrils, like birth, like Creation itself.

  This would be his finest hour.

  • • •

  FOR WHATEVER REASON, caution or anger at the man in the mask or simply a desire to do things differently than the others, the blond woman did not accept the inspection of the elevator and walked toward it. The man in the mask paused, his hand on the room’s doorknob. Inside the elevator was a laundry cart filled to the top with dirty linen and towels. The blond woman stared at it for a long moment, perhaps noting the bulge in the canvas on one side.

  The hands of a man whose body resembled an overgrown white caterpillar rose from the piled linen, each hand gripping a blue-black semi-auto. The first round hit the blond woman in the center of the forehead. She went straight down on her knees, jarring the wig off her head and revealing the face of Jaime O’Banion.

  Smiley sprang from the laundry cart into the hallway, casually firing a second shot into O’Banion’s mouth.

  The man in the mask went out the fire exit. Smiley shot the dark-skinned woman and the man who looked like a prizefighter before they had any idea what was happening to them. Then he opened the fire exit and looked down the stairs. He heard an outside door open and then slam shut. He went back to O’Banion’s body. He couldn’t believe it: O’Banion was alive, his face twitching like a bowl of tapioca. At least his nerve endings were alive. Maybe he could receive messages.

  “You still in there, Jaime?” Smiley said. “Better grab your cock. Queer-bait is back in town.”

  Smiley fired five rounds into O’Banion’s face, zip-zip-zip-zip-zip, just like that. Smiley straightened up, a stitch in his side. Owie, he thought. He bent his body back and forth like a bowling pin rocking.

  He didn’t gather up his brass; nor did he try to destroy the security camera. He limped back into the elevator, straightening his back, trying to get the stitch out of his side. He closed the doors and rode down to the first floor and walked over to the restaurant, his tool bag on his arm, wincing with each step. He ordered toast and coffee from a nice waitress who had a globe and anchor tattooed on the inside of her forearm. She didn’t write down the order.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

  Her eyes drifted away. “You’re leaking.”

  Smiley put a hand under his jacket, feeling for the place the stitch had been. He looked at his palm, then bit his lip, thinking. He wadded up a handkerchief and pressed it inside his shirt. “Could I have a fried pie to go? With a scoop of ice cream in one of those cold bags?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  A PLAINCLOTHES DETECTIVE BANGED on Clete’s door with the flat of his fist. A uniformed deputy sheriff stood behind him. Clete opened the door in his skivvies. He looked at the paramedics bagging up the bodies on the floor. “Help you?”

  “Yeah,” the detective said. He stared at Clete, recognition swimming into his eyes. “Are you Clete Purcel?”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The detective was big and wore a gray suit and spit-shined needle-nosed cowboy boots, a gold badge on his belt.

  “I was sleeping,” Clete said. “Until you beat on the door.”

  “What are you doing here, in this part of Louisiana?”

  “Passing through to New Iberia. I’m a PI. I’m on a case.”

  The detective raised his hand for the paramedics to stop their work. He unzipped two bags, already on the gurneys. “Step out here.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  “Nobody is interested in your dick. You know any of these people?”

  Clete stepped into the hallway. His gaze moved across the faces of the three gunshot victims, lingering for less than a second on the face of Jaime O’Banion.

  “No, I don’t know any of these people,” he said.

  “You’re a liar,” the detective said.

  “I used to be a homicide cop at NOPD,” Clete said. “A dog-fuck on your own turf is no fun. But that’s your grief, not mine. So how about eighty-sixing the insults?”

  “Get your clothes on.”

  “Search my room. Check my piece. I’m not your guy. You know it.”

  The detective put a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. “You’ll like our facilities. After two or three days, the baloney sandwiches start to grow on you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re queering your own investigation,” Clete said.

  “The guy’s an asshole,” the deputy said. “How about we let it slide?”

  “Hook him up,” the plainclothes said.

  “In his shorts?”

  “Throw a blanket over him. Take him down the back stairs. Maybe he won’t trip.”

  • • •

  I PARKED MY PICKUP and hung my badge around my neck. To circumvent the emergency vehicles and personnel, I cut through the restaurant and went out the exit, headed for the motel. A waitress was smoking a cigarette by the back door. She had a sweater over her shoulders. Clete was being marched toward a squad car, his wrists cuffed behind him. Someone had draped a blanket on his head. His boxer shorts and bare legs were exposed.

  “Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “Wait up.”

  A plainclothes looked at me. His eyes were as hard as agate. “Problem?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “This man be
longs in a hospital. I’m here to pick him up.”

  “There’re three stiffs in the meat wagon. One looks like he was drug facedown a fire escape. His name is Jaime O’Banion. Your friend says he never saw him before.”

  “That’s why you hooked up Clete Purcel?”

  “Interfere with this investigation and you can join him.”

  On the edge of my vision, I saw a waitress, her arms folded across her chest. She dropped her cigarette into a butt can and approached us. “Couldn’t help listening in, Stan,” she said to the plainclothes. “If you’re busting my friend there, you got the wrong fellow.”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, Flo,” he said.

  “Trying to save you from making a mistake, Stan. You can check my time card,” she replied. “I punched in at six-fifteen. Before that, I was in my friend’s room from midnight until six-ten.”

  “This guy killed a federal witness.”

  “Cut it out, Stan. He was in the Crotch. In Vietnam.”

  “Are you sure about the times, Flo?”

  “Do you think I enjoy talking about this in public?”

  The plainclothes turned to the deputy. “Unhook him.” He pointed his finger at Clete. “Have a nice day.”

  Clete pulled the blanket around him. He smiled at the plainclothes. “Hey.”

  “Hey, what?” the plainclothes said.

  “Next time I’m in town, I’ll drop by. We’ll have coffee. I really dig this place. It’s the prototype for Shitsville. When you’re here, you know you can’t go any lower. There’s got to be a kind of serenity in that.”

  I stepped in front of the plainclothes, interdicting his line of sight. “Thanks for your courtesy, Detective.”

  His eyes lit on mine. “Get him out of here.”

  “That’s a done deal,” I said.

  I watched him and the deputy walk away. I had known his kind all my life—mean to the bone, a walking penis, angry from the day he came out of the womb. He’d get even down the track, perhaps with a stun gun or a baton or a sap, on the body of an unsuspecting victim who would have no idea why he was being abused, and the rest of us would pay the tab, as always.

  When I turned around, the waitress was gone.

  “You were shacked up last night?” I said.

  “Are you kidding?” Clete said. “My stomach was a septic tank.”

  “What’s the story on the woman?”

  “I don’t know. I got to check her out. You see the way she walks? Cute ta-tas, narrow waist, big smooth rump.” He pulled on himself under the blanket. “My plunger just woke up.”

  “Stop that.”

  “Everything is copacetic. Hold all my calls. I’ll be right back.” He walked through the fire trucks and ambulances and squad cars and emergency personnel and spectators to the motel entrance and went inside, his blanket flapping at his heels, like a misplaced prophet who had stumbled into the twenty-first century. But that was Clete Purcel.

  Ten minutes later he was back, his hair wet-combed, his loafers buffed, his tie on, and his suit coat buttoned.

  “I’ve got my flasher on my pickup,” I said. “Stay on my bumper.”

  “I’ve got to talk with the lady first. What was her name? Flo?”

  “It’s time to go, Clete.”

  “When a woman wants you to know something, she lets you see her thoughts. You didn’t know that?”

  “You see her thoughts?”

  “Come with me. I’ll tell her you’re on the square.”

  What was the best way to have a conversation with Clete Purcel? You said nothing, and you didn’t try to understand what he said. You grabbed a noun and a verb here and there and went with it.

  I followed him inside. Flo was behind the counter. No one else was within earshot.

  “What’d you want to tell us, Miss Flo?” Clete said.

  She looked in my direction.

  “Dave is my podjo from NOPD, back when we were the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said.

  “There was a little guy in here,” she said. “He had a red mouth, like he was wearing lipstick. He was bleeding under his jacket. Talked with a lisp.”

  “He give you a name?” Clete said.

  “No. He asked for a fried pie and a scoop of ice cream to go. Know anybody like that?”

  I placed my business card on the counter. “Call me if you see him again, Miss Flo.”

  She pushed the card back at me. “Nope.”

  “Nope, what?” I said.

  “I don’t borrow trouble,” she replied.

  “Perfectly understandable,” Clete said. He took a ballpoint from his pocket and began clicking it. “You dig movies? I live for movies. I love people who love movies.” He pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and slid it and the pen toward her. She wrote a number on it. He stuck the napkin in his pocket. “Why didn’t you dime the guy?”

  “Every girl has a soft spot.” She held his eyes.

  Clete blushed. I couldn’t believe it.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, Helen called the detective who had hooked up Clete, and he emailed her the video from the security camera at the motel. She and Bailey and I watched it in her office. Bailey said little and didn’t look in my direction. Even though I was watching Smiley Wimple sling blood on the walls, I couldn’t get my mind off Bailey Ribbons. What a fool I was, I thought. I longed to touch her, to hold her, to smell her skin and hair, to be inside her. To be honest, I don’t see how any man on earth can live without a woman. Women are the perfect creation. I don’t care who hears that. Even before I hit puberty, they lived nightly in my dreams, and I have the feeling they’ll live with me in the grave.

  “You with us, Dave?” Helen said.

  “Sure.”

  “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  She froze the screen. “About what you just watched, for Christ’s sake.”

  “O’Banion’s ticket got punched. So did the woman and the guy who has a face like a speedbag. Who are they?”

  “We don’t know yet,” she said. “Boy, you’re a ball of sunshine.”

  “The issue is the guy in the mask,” I said.

  “Duh,” she said.

  “He’s an amateur,” I said.

  “Amateur how?” Bailey said.

  “He messed up with the spray can,” I said. “Rather than admit he messed up, he tried to hide the can and let the others be identified. Eventually, they would have given him up.”

  “Maybe they weren’t going to be alive much longer,” Bailey said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “What’s with the sign language?” she asked.

  “That and lip reading are invaluable in prison,” I said.

  “So the guy in the mask doesn’t care about loyalties?” Bailey said. “Somebody with no feelings? A hard case, a real piece of shit?”

  “You don’t have to use that language,” I said.

  Helen was looking at both of us now. “What is this?”

  “Just making an observation,” Bailey said.

  “Whatever is going on with you two, leave it at the door,” Helen said.

  The room was quiet.

  Bailey coughed under her breath. “Everyone is sure that’s Wimple who climbed out of the laundry cart?”

  “He left his brass,” Helen said. “The prints on them are his.”

  “I thought he was a pro,” Bailey said. “Why wouldn’t he pick up his casings?”

  “He was wounded,” I said.

  They both looked at me. “Where’d you get this information?” Helen said.

  “A friend of Clete’s,” I said. “A waitress.”

  “Why didn’t she tell the investigator at the scene?” Helen said.

  “Because the investigator is a troglodyte,” I replied.

  “How bad is Wimple hurt?” Helen said.

  “From what the waitress said, he was bleeding from his side.”

  “I don’t get any of this,” Helen said.
“Wimple is a psychopath, but he’s protecting Clete? And Jaime O’Banion was taking orders from an amateur who cost him his life?”

  “That about sums it up,” I said.

  “And?” she said.

  “The guy in the mask is not a noun,” I said.

  “I’m not in the mood, Dave,” she said.

  “Read it like you want,” I said. “Nothing we do is going to change what’s happening.”

  Helen looked at Bailey. “Do you have any idea what he’s saying?”

  Bailey shook her head. But I saw it in her eyes. She knew exactly what I was saying, and I knew at that moment that neither of us would ever be able to separate entirely from the other, no matter how great our differences.

  “Let me know if I can help you with anything else, Helen,” I said.

  I got up and walked down the corridor to my office. I knew it was probably a self-indulgent act and stupid on top, but I didn’t care. I stood at my window and gazed at the Teche. It was high and yellow and running fast, a cluster of red swamp-maple leaves spinning in the current and disappearing around a corner as though dropping into infinity. I wondered if I wasn’t watching a message, one requiring us to acknowledge not only the lunar influences on the tide but the place to which we all must go.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Bailey came through my door without knocking. “You just walk out? On the case? On you and me? On everything?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “I’m not right for you, Bailey. I was deceiving you and myself.”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

  I looked at the bayou again. The light was gold in the trees along the bank, the grass a pale green, the camellia bushes swelling in the wind. The surface of the water seemed to shrivel like old skin. When I turned around, she was six inches from my face. “I want to pound you with my fists,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Are you having a psychotic break?”

  “You knew what I was talking about with Helen.”

  “About the guy in the mask not being a noun?”

  “Yes.”