The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

“Hey, Squanto,” I said.

  “Sorry, Dave. I didn’t see you there.”

  “Is that your new book?”

  “Yeah, it’s called The Wife.”

  I looked through the window and across the bayou. “Is that the movie crew over there?”

  “The whole city is invited.”

  “You’re not going?”

  “I took your advice. I’m getting loose from Des and his crowd. I’m not going to Arizona for the reshoot either. Des is leaving in the morning.”

  “What changed your attitude?”

  She rubbed her forehead and took a breath. “I love Hollywood, I don’t care what people say about it. But Des isn’t Hollywood, Dave. He’s Leonardo da Vinci working for Cesare Borgia, except he won’t admit it.”

  “He’s laundering money?”

  “Probably.”

  “Where’s Wexler in all this?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “No man is just a woman’s friend.”

  She jiggled her fingers at me. “Bye, Dave.”

  I went into the kitchen and fixed a sandwich and ate it, drinking simultaneously from the milk carton. I could not remember ever drinking from a milk carton or any container I shared with someone else. There was something loose in my head. Or, better said, like wet paper tearing or wires shorting out or images moving behind a curtain you know you’re not supposed to touch.

  I opened the back door to let in Mon Tee Coon, muddy feet included, then walked out in the yard and gazed across the Teche at the celebrants in the park. I had a feeling in my chest that is hard to describe. It was similar to the recurrent nightmare I had as a child when my mother ran off with the man named Mack and my father stayed drunk and bloodied his fists on any man foolish enough to come within an arm’s reach. In the dream, the sky turned to a sheet of carbon paper, then the sun descended over the earth’s rim and time stopped forever, with no transition into a heavenly kingdom or purpose or meaning of any kind. Without knowing it, I had found the quintessence of death, with no ability to explain it to others.

  I heard Alafair open the screen door behind me. “I forgot to tell you, the deputy at the evidence locker called,” she said.

  “What about?” I asked.

  “He just said call him.”

  The deputy who oversaw our evidence storage was a kindly old man named Ben Theriot. No one was sure of his age, and his eyes were very bad and his memory not much better, but no one had the heart to force him into retirement.

  “How you doin’, Mr. Ben?” I said when I got him on the line.

  “Maybe not too good, Dave. ’Member that gym bag you brought in?”

  “The one from Desmond Cormier’s place?”

  “Yes, suh, that one. I was cleaning the top shelves and I knocked it off. A li’l mint-like t’ing fell out. It must have been wedged in the lining. I ain’t seen it at first and I stepped on it.”

  “What is it, exactly?”

  “A Nicorette.”

  I remembered interviewing Antoine Butterworth in City Park and Butterworth putting a Nicorette on his tongue. “Put it in a Ziploc and we’ll see what the lab can do for us Monday.”

  “Dave, I hate to tell you this, but I wasn’t t’inking too good. I just put some lotion on my hands ’cause I got dry skin, and I picked up the mint and dropped it back in the bag.”

  I pinched my eyes with my fingers and tried not to react. “Don’t worry about it. The information you’ve given me is helpful on its own.”

  “You ain’t just saying that?”

  “Use some tweezers to put the mint in a Ziploc and we’ll be fine.”

  “T’ank you,” he said.

  Maybe we had just blown the first solid evidence we had in the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux, but what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough? Besides, I didn’t need any more evidence. I had come to believe that if you threw a rock at Desmond or Butterworth or anyone in their vicinity, you would probably hit a guilty man.

  There was nothing lighthearted about my sentiment. I could feel a weight the size of a brick in my chest.

  “Where you going, Dave?” Alafair said.

  “Are Butterworth and Desmond in the park?”

  “Everyone is.”

  I nodded. “Nice day for it, huh?”

  “For what?”

  I smiled and shrugged, then went into the backyard and threw pecans at a tree trunk. When I heard her clicking on the keyboard again, I walked down the driveway, got into my truck, and headed up Loreauville Road for Bailey Ribbons’s cottage.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T TRY TO tell her why I was there, because I wasn’t sure myself. I don’t mean to be too personal, but long ago I made my troth with the Man Upstairs and asked that my sacrifice be acceptable in His sight. I never looked back, even when I fucked my life with a garden rake. I knew the score: You were in the club or you weren’t. For a drunk, loss of sobriety quickly becomes loss of everything you value and love and respect, including your soul and then your life. When you’re sober, you roll the dice with the sunrise. That’s a victory in itself and not one to be taken lightly. It’s glorious to just be part of the action. But control remains an illusion.

  Bailey didn’t know what to make of me. It’s funny how she reminded me of a prim girl who had walked out of a frontier schoolhouse. “You came to your senses?” she said. “You gave up the old-man routine?”

  “No, I’m still old. But I owe you a debt.”

  “What debt?”

  “You shared your life with me, kiddo.”

  “Call me that again and I’ll slap your face.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll always love you. I’ll be there for you any time you need me.”

  “God, you’re nuts.”

  “Probably.”

  “Dave, there’s something in your eyes that’s really troubling.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to do something that’s not you.”

  “I’ve never found out who I am,” I said. “I don’t think anyone does. That’s the biggest joke of all.”

  We were standing in front of her cottage. The wind was blowing her dress against her legs. Her mouth was the color of a bruised plum. I wanted to kiss her, but I knew if I did, I wouldn’t leave. So I told her again I loved the name Bailey Ribbons, and I drove away.

  • • •

  I MADE A STOP at St. Edward’s Church and, before I left, stuck a thick fold of bills into the poor box. Then I headed for City Park, a clock ticking in my head. I knew how the day would end. Or maybe “day” was the wrong term. I was no longer registering the passage of time in minutes or hours or days or weeks or months. I knew I had entered a new season in my life, one that had nothing to do with rotations of the earth. It’s the season when you accept your fate and give up fear and worry and end your lover’s quarrel with the world and follow the foot tracks of hominids into a place that is perhaps already at the tips of your fingers. When that happens to you, you’ll know it, and if you’re wise, you will not try to explain it to others, any more than you would try to explain light to a man born without sight.

  As chance would have it, my moment of peace after leaving the church would be intruded upon by the ebb and flow that reduce tragedy to melodrama and a grander vision of the human story to procedural squalor. This came in the form of my cell phone vibrating on the truck seat.

  I picked it up, my eyes on the road. “Robicheaux.”

  “Where are you, Pops?” Helen said.

  “Just coming out of St. Edward’s.”

  “Get over to the park. I’ve already sent the bus. I’m not sure what’s going on. Sean McClain is already there. From what he says, Wimple may have done a curtain call.”

  “He killed somebody?”

  “It sounds too weird for belief. We ROA at the park.”

  “Copy that.”

  I drove down East Main, past my house and the Shadows, and rumbled across
the steel grid of the drawbridge over the Teche, then entered the urban forest we call City Park. If anything was amiss, I couldn’t see it. The celebrants were going at it, the band playing, long lines at the beer kegs and the hard-liquor tables. I drove along the asphalt path toward the far end of the park, then saw an ambulance backed into the trees, its flashers blinking. A cruiser was next to it, its door open, and Sean McClain was standing in the shadows, talking into his mic. I pulled in behind him. A black Subaru convertible with California tags was parked in a dry swale piled with dead leaves and strewn with air vines. The medics were jerking a gurney out of the ambulance.

  “What do you have, Sean?” I asked.

  “Looks like that old boy run out of luck. I mean if that’s him.”

  I walked through the leaves to the lip of the swale. Both front doors of the Subaru were open, the passenger seat shoved hard against the dashboard. Smiley Wimple, wearing a white suit, was curled in a ball on the ground. His eyes were open and sightless. There was a bloody hole in his suit, just above his heart. He seemed strangely at peace. A small blue-black semi-auto rested in his right palm.

  Other emergency vehicles were turning off Parkview Drive, winding their way past the old National Guard Armory.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “A black woman, name unknown, called in the 911,” Sean said. He took a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “This is what I got from the dispatcher.”

  “Go on.”

  “The black woman said, ‘There’s a little-bitty man been killed in the park. He didn’t have to do it.’ ”

  “ ‘He didn’t have to do it’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No idea who ‘he’ is?”

  “No, sir. Have you and me seen this car before? Maybe at Cypremort Point?”

  “That’s exactly where we saw it. It belongs to Antoine Butterworth.”

  I put on latex and looked in the back seat of the Subaru. There was a dime bag of weed on the floor and a .22 casing on the seat. I straightened up and closed the door just as Helen’s cruiser pulled in. She got out and looked at Smiley’s body. She was wearing navy blue slacks and a starched white shirt and her gold shield and service belt. “That’s Wimple?”

  “Afraid so.”

  Her eyes lifted to mine, flat and all business. “A great loss to the world? That’s what you’re about to say?”

  “If I grew up like he did, I probably wouldn’t be any different. I can’t figure out how the shooter got the drop on him.”

  Helen put on latex and squatted down and used a ballpoint to ease the semi-auto from Smiley’s hand. She dropped the magazine and pulled back the slide. A round was in the chamber, an indentation where the firing pin had struck it. She tapped the round loose and caught it in her palm. It was unfired. The firing pin had hit upon a dead round. She stood up and bagged the gun and magazine and loose round.

  “How do you read it?” she said.

  “According to Sean, the 911 caller said, ‘He didn’t have to do it.’ There’s no brass on the ground. Wimple didn’t get off a shot. The shooter had a choice. He decided to pop Wimple. At least that’s what the 911 caller seemed to be saying.”

  “You ran the tags?”

  “I don’t have to. That’s Butterworth’s car.”

  “Why would he arbitrarily kill Wimple?”

  “Maybe he was scared shitless. Or maybe he did it for fun.”

  “Any lawyer would get him off on self-defense. Why would he flee the scene?”

  “He’s probably heard stories about the bridal suite at Angola.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Helen said. “Wimple had a reason for targeting Butterworth. He killed only two types of people: child abusers and people who tried to hurt him. Butterworth is not a child abuser. So something else is involved. Maybe Butterworth is our guy after all.”

  “That, or he’s one of our guys.”

  “Who do you think the woman might be?”

  “Someone poor and desperate and willing to do anything for a few dollars.”

  The wind blew through the trees, scattering the leaves and straightening the air vines, and I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I squatted down next to Smiley’s body again. Broken daisies and crushed buttercups and rose petals were with the leaves. I picked them up in my hand and stared at them. Even in the shade they were as bright as splashes of paint from a brush. There were no flowers of this kind growing anywhere near the crime scene. I looked into Smiley’s face. There was a wet glimmer sealed in one eye, more like an expression of warmth than sorrow.

  “What are you looking at?” Helen said.

  “These flowers. I don’t know how they got here.”

  “What flowers?”

  “These.” I lifted my hand.

  “Those are leaves.”

  I stood up and looked at the shafts of sunlight shining through the canopy. I brushed off my fingers. I looked at her and then at my hands. “I haven’t had much sleep the last couple of nights.”

  “Don’t go weird on me, bwana. Let’s get whatever we can to the lab.”

  The paramedics placed Smiley into a body bag and pulled the zipper over his chin and nose and eyes and the crown of his head, then dropped him onto the gurney and trundled him into the ambulance, the bag shaking as though it were filled with porridge.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  TWO HOURS LATER, I was at Clete’s motor court. He sat silently in a chair by the window, his profile silhouetted against the window shade, while I told him everything that had happened in the park.

  “I never believed Wimple would get capped by an amateur,” he said.

  “He probably had a box of old ammunition and got careless after he was wounded at the motel.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” he said.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I didn’t say it was. What’s the plan?”

  “There’s an APB on Butterworth.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “We take him down and give him his alternatives. We stop screwing around. I don’t believe there’s just one guy anymore. Cormier could have stopped all this a long time ago.”

  “I’ll take it a step further,” Clete said. “From what I know, or what you’ve told me, I think Cormier and the rest of them are on the spike and their heads glow in the dark. Maybe the bunch of them are into S and M. I hear Cormier has a pole you could fly the flag on.”

  As always, I was awed by the images Clete picked out of the air. “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  More important, I didn’t want to believe that the shy redbone boy whom I had always admired was capable of allowing a murderer and a sadist to thrive in our midst. By the same token, I had no doubt there was a cruel element in his personality, one that was like a candle guttering and flaring alight again.

  “I feel like we’ve passed over something,” Clete said.

  “That’s the way every investigation goes,” I said.

  “This is different. This ritual stuff, the tarot, posing the victims, yeah, that’s all real. But there’s something we missed, something real simple.” He waited for me to speak. “Come in, Houston,” he said.

  “I saw some crushed flowers by Wimple’s body. There were no flowers anywhere around the crime scene. I picked them up in my hand and tried to show them to Helen and they turned into leaves.”

  He lifted his shoulder holster from the back of a chair and slipped his arm through it. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”

  “I interviewed three people at the picnic who said they saw a man answering Wimple’s description talking to two little girls who were wearing flowers in their hair and around their necks. No one knew who they were or where they came from.”

  “Drop it.”

  “It was you telling me we may be living in a necropolis. How cheerful a thought is that?”

  “That’s why I never listen to myself,” he replied.

  “I went by St. Edward’s this aft
ernoon. I think I might be headed for the barn. You know the feeling. Don’t tell me you don’t.”

  “If you go down, so do I. So fuck that.”

  Clete removed his .38 snub from his holster, flicked out the cylinder from the frame, and dumped the rounds into the wastebasket. He took a fresh box of shells from the kitchen cabinet and began dropping them one at a time into the chambers, his eyes clear, his face untroubled. “Who do you think the little girls were?”

  “A woman said she heard one of them say her name was Felicity and her friend’s was Perpetua.”

  He nodded as though the names meant something to him, but I was sure they didn’t. They were the names of two women who died in a Roman arena in the early third century.

  “Wimple looked at peace. I think—”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “I hope Smiley is in a good place. Let’s take a ride.”

  Ten minutes later, my cell phone vibrated and I answered the strangest phone call I have ever received.

  • • •

  THE CALLER ID said Caller Unknown, but there was no mistaking the voice.

  “Detective Robicheaux?”

  “Butterworth?”

  “Yes,” he said. The word had a knot in it as tight as a wet rope.

  “Where are you, sir?” I asked.

  “That’s not important.”

  “Do you want to tell me something?”

  “Yes.”

  “About Smiley Wimple?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s an echo. Are you on a speakerphone?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “It would be better if you came in on your own. Bring a lawyer. The shooting looks like self-defense to us.”

  “No. I’ll be going away.”

  “Not a good idea,” I said. Clete and I were still in his cottage; he was looking at me from across the room.

  “I’ve had many problems over the years,” Butterworth said. “I ruined my reputation in Hollywood. Desmond has been a good soul to me. But he’s about to bid his origins adieu, and perhaps the love of his life. That’s all I have to say.”

  “Where are you, sir?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  For just a moment I thought I heard wind rushing and waves breaking. “Don’t sign off, partner. Did you kill Lucinda Arceneaux?”