There was no answer.
“Are you hearing me? Get on the square, Mr. Butterworth. You’re an intelligent, educated man. Don’t buy in to self-pity.”
“You’re quite the fellow. It’s been good knowing you, Detective Robicheaux.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s all any of it is. Nothing. Someday you’ll read between the lines.”
He broke the connection. Clete stared at me. The strap of his shoulder holster was pinched against his shirt. “What was that about?”
“I don’t know how to read it. I wish I had it on tape.”
“Got any idea where he was calling from?”
“Waves and wind in the background.”
“Cypremort Point?” he said.
• • •
THE TIDE WAS in, and the clouds in the west had turned to gold, and the waves were curling and exploding on the blocks of concrete
at the base of Desmond’s property. The garage doors below the house were open. No vehicles were inside. I cut the engine, and Clete and I walked up the two flights of wooden steps to the entrance. The door was slightly ajar. I tapped it with my fingertips. It drifted back on the hinges.
“Iberia Sheriff’s Department!” I called.
There was no answer. I went inside with Clete behind me, his snub-nose in his right hand. The sliding door to the deck was open, the room redolent with salt spray.
“Man,” Clete said, wincing.
Butterworth had slipped from a stuffed leather chair and was sitting on the floor, his head twisted to one side. There was an entry hole under his chin and a .22 semi-auto inches from his hand. The bullet had obviously traveled through the roof of his mouth and embedded or bounced around in the brainpan. One eye had eight-balled. The drip from the entry wound ran like a snake inside his silk shirt.
I started toward him. Clete clenched his fist in the air, the infantryman’s sign to stop. He went into all the rooms of the house and came back out. “Clear.”
I called Helen on my cell phone. “Send the bus to Desmond Cormier’s place. We’ve got another one.”
“Desmond?” she said.
“Butterworth. It looks like he capped himself. With a twenty-two auto. I have a feeling we’ll match the casing with the one in the back of his Subaru.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Butterworth called me. He wouldn’t tell me where he was. I thought he might be here.”
“Who’s with you?”
“Clete.”
“You took him out there and not Ribbons?”
“Affirmative. Out.” I shut my phone.
“Trouble?” Clete said.
“Always. You see anything wrong here?”
“About Butterworth? Hard to tell. He was the kind of guy who’s hell on his victim but can’t take the heat himself.”
“His Subaru is in the pound. How’d he get here?” I said.
“Maybe in a cab. Run the tape backward. Lucinda Arceneaux died of a heroin injection between the toes. Who uses needles like that except a junkie? You found Butterworth’s works during a search, right?”
“Desmond might be an intravenous user, too,” I said.
Clete was wearing his porkpie hat. He took it off and spun it on his finger. “Helen is pissed because I’m here?”
“Forget it. I’m probably winding down with the department anyway.”
“I’d better blow.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” I looked around the living room. The sun had started its descent into the bay. The light was shining in the hallway on the framed still photos. “Earlier you said we’d missed something.”
“Yeah, three women have been killed. What do they have in common?”
“Bella Delahoussaye was a singer,” I replied. “Hilary Bienville was a part-time hooker. Lucinda Arceneaux wanted to get innocent people off death row. All of them were black.”
“They all had qualities,” he said. “The guy who killed them hated and desired them. How about the guy in the shrimp net? What was his name?”
“Joe Molinari,” I said.
“He’s the one who doesn’t fit.”
Clete went out onto the deck. The wind was blowing hard, spotting his Hawaiian shirt with raindrops. He started back inside, then stopped and looked down at something in the track of the sliding door. He dug it out with the tip of his ballpoint and picked it up between his fingers. “Take a look.”
“A tooth?”
“Part of one,” he said. “There’s blood on it.”
“Maybe the round knocked it out of Butterworth’s mouth.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Think we’re getting played?”
“Before Butterworth hung up on me, he praised Desmond.”
“Like he was being forced to?”
“I’m not sure. He was obviously distraught. The last thing he said was ‘Someday you’ll read between the lines.’ ”
“Got any idea where Cormier is?” Clete said.
“No, but when we find him, he’ll appear shocked and indignant and dismayed.”
“Congratulations,” he said. “I think you’re finally catching on to this guy.”
I turned in a circle to look at the room again. Butterworth’s tenor sax was propped against the couch; the mouthpiece lay on the couch’s arm. A large vintage Stromberg-Carlson record player stood against one wall, its top open, its console lit. I looked at the LP on the spindle. It was a recording of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, which included Flip Phillips, the legendary tenor sax man Desmond had told me Butterworth admired.
“You give me too much credit,” I said to Clete. “I haven’t caught on to squat.”
• • •
I HAD NO IDEA where to start looking for Desmond. Bailey showed up with the ambulance and Cormac the coroner and the forensic team. Clete stayed down by the water, his back to the house.
“No idea where Des is, huh?” Bailey said.
“Des?”
“Don’t take your anger out on me, Dave.”
“No, I don’t know where he is.”
“He’s a moody, sentimental guy,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“I hear the whole crew is headed back to Monument Valley in the morning,” she said. “I think he’ll sell his house and we’ll never see him again.”
I had to give it to her. She was always ahead of the game. I wondered what things would have been like if I had met her fifty years ago. “Will you take over here?”
“Where are you going?”
“To find Desmond.”
“Take Clete Purcel with you. Helen is on her way.”
I looked into the magical light that lived in her eyes, and I knew I would never get over her, no matter what she might have done in her younger years. “See you later.”
“I said Desmond was sentimental. That doesn’t mean I trust him. Watch your ass, Dave.”
“Don’t use that kind of language,” I said. I even tried to smile. But I couldn’t believe I’d said that, and in that moment I knew I was fixated on the image of Clementine Carter as much as Desmond was, and that I would have a secret longing for both Clementine and Bailey the rest of my life and I would share it with no one.
• • •
I WENT OUTSIDE INTO the wind and picked up Clete and headed north up the two-lane. I told him of my conversation with Bailey about Desmond.
“So where do you think he is?” Clete said.
“At Lucinda Arceneaux’s crypt or his birthplace.”
“You’re buying in to that crap again?” he said.
“Buying in to what crap?”
“Cormier as the great artist. Great artists bully and degrade people on the set. Because that’s what he did, right?”
We drove in silence. The sun hung as bright as a bronze shield over the bay. Pelicans were plummeting from the sky like dive-bombers, their wings tucked back, disappearing under the water, then rising aga
in with baitfish pouched inside their beaks.
“I got to say something,” Clete said.
“Go ahead.”
“I want to believe Butterworth isn’t a suicide and our guy is still out there. I want to believe that because I planned to blow up his shit. No, worse than that. I want to take him down in pieces.”
“So?”
“So, nothing. You talked to Butterworth before he did the Big Exit. If someone was holding a gun on him, he could have sent you a signal any number of ways.”
“Maybe it was that statement about reading between the lines.”
“Titty babies who beat up hookers like to sound profound. The truth is, they’re titty babies who beat up hookers, usually small ones.”
“He was listening to a recording of Jazz at the Philharmonic and maybe playing along with it. He might have stopped to clean his mouthpiece. Why would he suddenly call me up and commit suicide?”
“Suicide isn’t a rational act. I knew mercenaries in El Sal. They were all looking for the boneyard. They just didn’t know it. You know what I think?”
“No.”
“Butterworth and Cormier had some kind of complicated relationship going on. I also think we’ll never know. We’ll never know what it is either.”
Maybe he was right; maybe not. I didn’t care. I had always believed in Desmond in the same way I’d believed in Bella Delahoussaye. They came from the Louisiana I loved, and I loved Louisiana in the same way you love a religion. You don’t care if your obsession is rational, and you’re not bothered that your love is partly erotic. The Great Whore of Babylon is a commanding mistress. Once she widens her thighs and takes you inside her, she never lets go.
“Forget the crypt,” Clete said. “Go to the res.”
“Why the res?”
“The casino is there, and probably some of the scum-suckers out of Jersey who have been backing Desmond’s films. Maybe they brought their skanks and he can get his knob polished before he continues his life as a great artist.”
Chapter Forty
WE FOUND DESMOND Cormier in the late afternoon on the piece of hardscrabble land where his grandparents had run a general store; now the land was pocked with sinkholes and overgrown with persimmon trees and palmettos and swamp maples cobwebbed with air vines and storm trash blown out of the Atchafalaya Basin. Desmond was standing by a Humvee, staring at the shadows near an inlet that had turned red in the sunset. Behind us, I could see the glow of the casino in the distance.
I think the images he saw were not the ones I described. I believed he was looking into the past at the skinny twelve-year-old boy who roped cinder blocks to each end of a broomstick under a white sun and began creating a body that would put the fear of God into the bullies who tormented him on the school bus. I suspect he wondered about the fate of the bullies who taunted him and shoved him onto the gravel. Some were probably dead, some stacking time in Angola, some cleaning floors with mops and pails. If he ran into them, they probably would not connect him with the boy they had mocked. One thing I was sure of: If Desmond did meet them, he would treat them with kindness.
That’s why he angered me. He had the capacity to do enormous good in the world. But he handed out his gifts one coin at a time, and never with anonymity, unless you counted his payment for Lucinda Arceneaux’s crypt.
His talent had received global recognition, but his faith in his creativity was not enough to make him forswear the illegal money that powered his artistic enterprises. And enterprises they were. Without the sweaty multitudes and the satisfaction they demanded for the price of a theater ticket, Desmond probably would have been running an independent company filming lizards in the Texas Panhandle.
I parked on the faint outline of the dirt track that traversed the property, and asked Clete to stay in the truck.
“You got it,” he replied, and tilted his porkpie hat down on his eyes.
I walked up behind Desmond. He showed no awareness of my presence, even though I knew he heard me.
“What’s the haps?” I said.
He grinned in the same way he could light up a room when he was a kid. “How’s it going, Dave?”
“Hard to say, things have been moving so fast. It looks like Antoine Butterworth killed Smiley Wimple, then popped himself.”
“Whoa.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“What was that about Antoine popping himself?”
“He called me from your house, then parked one under his chin. That’s what it looks like.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“If it’s any consolation, he praised your name before he pulled the plug.”
Desmond was facing me now, his sleeves rolled, his forearms pumped and vascular. “Don’t be cynical, Dave. Antoine is my friend.”
“Your ‘friend’ may have arbitrarily murdered Smiley Wimple.”
“What do you mean, ‘arbitrarily’?”
“That’s what the only witness says. Wimple’s gun misfired, and Butterworth didn’t have to kill him, although a prosecutor would never be able to prove that.”
Desmond rubbed at his nose. “You’re not jerking me around? Antoine’s dead?”
“Unless he’s been resurrected.”
“Where is he?”
“Probably on a slab.”
“You’re a callous man.”
“He told me someday I would be able to read between the lines. Have any idea what he meant?”
“No.”
“Where does your money come from?” I asked.
“Half a dozen sources, all of them legitimate.”
“You might have a Maltese cross tattooed on your ankle, but you’ll never be Geoffrey Chaucer’s good knight,” I said. “I don’t care how many showers you take, you’ve still got shit on your nose.”
He turned his face to the wind, his hair lifting, his wide-set eyes devoid of light, his expression as meaningless as a cake pan, his torso a piece of sculpted stone inside his shirt. Had he swung on me, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“He suffered?” he said.
“Butterworth? Maybe. He was listening to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert before he signed off.”
“That sounds like him. He loves Flip Phillips.”
“The man I talked to was sweating ball bearings.”
“He was an artist,” he said. “In his way, a dreamer.”
“When he wasn’t hanging up working girls on coat hooks. You’re going to Arizona tomorrow?”
“At sunrise.”
“Make all the pictures you want,” I said. “I’m going to get you.” I walked away.
“You think you can hurt me?” he called to my back. “After what’s happened here? That’s what you think?”
I got into the truck and started the engine. Clete had been drowsing. “Hey! What’s going on with Cormier?” he asked.
“He was shocked and indignant,” I replied.
We drove back to the two-lane and headed home, an orange sun dissolving into the wetlands, threaded with smoke from stubble fires.
• • •
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, Cormac the coroner called me at home. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“I’ll probably have to declare Butterworth’s death a suicide, but it bothers me.”
“Why?”
“The broken tooth your friend Purcel found in the door track. The bullet went in behind the jaw and traveled upward through the tongue and the palate in a clean line. It’s possible the bullet deflected off the tooth, except I don’t see the evidence.”
“Call it like you see it,” I said.
“Here’s my other problem: I talked to the prosecutor last night. I think everyone wants to shut the book on this one.”
“Wimple and Butterworth get bagged and tagged, and everyone goes home happy?”
“People are people,” he said. “What’s your opinion?”
“Desmond Cormier knows the truth, b
ut he’s never going to tell us.”
“His half sister was murdered. What the hell is wrong with this guy?”
“Money and power,” I said. “You know a stronger drug?”
“How about getting up in the morning with a clear conscience?” he replied. “You talked with Butterworth before he went out. You believed he capped himself?”
“I think maybe someone was setting up Cormier, and I think he’s too dumb to know it.”
• • •
I FIXED A BOWL of Grape-Nuts and milk and blackberries and ate it on the back steps. I also brought a bowl of cat food for Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. The trees were dripping with humidity, the bayou high and swollen with mud, the flooded elephant ears along the bank beaded with drops of water that slid like quicksilver off the surface. I heard a vehicle pull into the driveway, then footsteps coming around the side of the house.
“Hope I ain’t disturbing your Sunday morning,” Sean said. He was in uniform, his cheeks bright with aftershave, his gun belt polished, the creases in his trousers as sharp as knife blades.
“Get yourself a cup of coffee off the stove. Alafair is still asleep. Give me a refill, too.” I handed him my cup.
He went inside and came back out with a filled cup in each hand. He sat down beside me and looked at Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. He had a small mouth, like a girl’s, and eyes like a child’s. “I went out to the airport this morning.”
“What for?”
“To watch them movie people take off. They were happy, like all the things that happened here don’t mean anything.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I killed a man. I’ll have him in my dreams the rest of my life. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for these people.”
“Blame other people, and you’ll never have peace.”
“That’s what you told yourself in Vietnam?”
“I wasn’t that smart.”
“Dave, I’d give anything if I hadn’t shot Tillinger. It’s eating me up.”
“I don’t think Tillinger would hold it against you, Sean. He made a choice—the wrong one. Wherever he is, I think he knows that and forgives you for it.”
“You don’t dream about the men you killed?”
“Sometimes.”
“What do you do about it?”
The New Iberia Blues Page 40
