A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  A purple Oldsmobile was parked in front of the last cottage on the row. Clete tapped lightly on the door. He was wearing a porkpie hat tilted over his brow, his coat open, a lead-weighted blackjack in his right coat pocket, a manila folder rolled in a cone and stuffed in the other.

  A bare-chested man with peroxided, coiled hair that hung in his face opened the door. His lips looked made of rubber, his torso a stump tapering to a thirty-inch waist. He wore sharkskin slacks and suspenders and flip-flops. One eye looked punched back in his skull. He took out a comb and began combing his hair, exposing his shaved pits. “What do you want?”

  “Ray Haskell?” Clete said.

  “Maybe. Who are you?”

  “Clete Purcel. I called your office in New Orleans.”

  “About what?”

  “Dave Robicheaux. Can I come in?”

  “Who told you where I was?”

  “I asked around the Quarter. I’m a PI. Like you. You got a beer?”

  “I look like a liquor store? What’s with you, man?”

  “What I just said. Hey, I dig those sharkskin drapes. That’s fifties-style, right? Can I come in or not? It’s about to rain.”

  “I’m a little occupied. Get my drift? Make an appointment.”

  “Just want to know why you followed my podjo Dave to Huntsville, then dissed him on the bayou with that routine about driving golf balls. See, you diss Dave, you diss me. Diggez-vous on that, noble mon?”

  Ray Haskell replaced his comb in his back pocket. “I got a friend due here you don’t want to meet. So I’m gonna do you a favor and close the door. Then I’m going to bolt it and put the night chain on and check on my lady. You reading me on this?”

  “Sure,” Clete said. “But I got these printouts and photos of you and a guy named Timothy Riordan. It looks like you’re both former flatfeet now doing scut work for the Shondell family and maybe a few people in Miami. I’m talking about political nutcases who speak Cuban and like to feed body parts to the gators in the glades.”

  “You read too many comic books. Regardless of that, we got the message. So I’m saying good night. Tell Robicheaux and tell yourself no foul, no harm. Now get the fuck out of here.”

  The bathroom door opened. Clete heard sniffling, then saw a slight, pretty black woman step out into the light of a bed lamp. He had known her when she turned tricks for a pimp named Zipper, who got his name from the scars he left on girls who tried to go independent. Her name was Li’l Face Dautrieve. Her hair was shiny and thick and looked like a wig that was too large for her head. Her eyes and nose and mouth were concentrated in the center of her face, not unlike sprinkles on a cookie. Her upper lip was split and her left eye swollen behind a bloody Kleenex she held against it. One cheek looked like she had swallowed a mouthful of bumblebees.

  “This guy did that to you, Li’l Face?” Clete said.

  “Ain’t your bidness, Fat Man,” she said. “Don’t be messing in it.”

  “You did that, asshole?” Clete said to Ray.

  “You’d better beat feet, pal,” Ray said. “If you—”

  Clete’s fist was almost the size of a cantaloupe. He drove it into the center of Ray’s face and sent him crashing into a breakfast table and chair. Then he kicked the door shut and picked up the chair and broke it on Ray’s head.

  “I ax for it, Fat Man,” Li’l Face said. “I got a baby. He know where I stay at.”

  “Why’d he hit you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Answer me, Li’l Face.”

  “He wanted me to do things like Zipper made me do. He tried to put his—”

  “I got the picture,” Clete said.

  He ripped the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around Ray’s throat, then dragged him squirming and twisting into the bathroom, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. Clete drove his head into the toilet bowl and slammed down the seat, then mounted it and began jumping up and down on it like a giant white ape, crushing Ray’s head into the shape of a football, blood stippling the bowl.

  “He’s strangling, Fat Man,” Li’l Face said.

  “Get his wallet and take whatever you want, then go home,” Clete said.

  She pulled the wallet from Ray’s back pocket. Clete thought he felt a whoosh of air in the room, then he smelled the odor of rain and wet trees. He turned and saw Li’l Face squeeze past a tall man by the bed. She dropped the wallet and ran for the front door. The man pointed a nine-millimeter at Clete’s chest. “Get down.”

  “You’re Timothy Riordan,” Clete said. “I got your photo.”

  “My friends call me Timmy. You can call me the guy who’s about to print your brains on the wall.”

  Clete held up one hand. “I’m coming.” He stepped down, balancing himself. “Things got out of control. We can work this out.”

  “You wish, blimpo.”

  Clete entered what he sometimes called “the moment.” Someone points a gun at you and lets it wander over your body as arbitrarily as the red dot on a laser sight. Eternity and what it holds or may not hold is one blink away. The round in the chamber will probably tear through your sternum or heart or lungs, carrying bits of you into the wall. The pain will be like a firecracker exploding inside your chest. You will not be blown backward or spin in a circle, as shooting victims are portrayed in motion pictures. You will drop straight to the floor, like a collapsed puppet, and lie in a fetal position and feel your blood pool around you. If you are lucky, your tormentor will not try to increase your pain and fear. All because you made the wrong choice during “the moment.”

  So what do you do?

  “You’re quite a guy,” Clete said. “I’ve seen your jacket. You worked vice. You were getting freebies up on Airline. You liked to knock around Vietnamese girls. Where’d you get your piece? Off a crippled newsy? You like movies? I do. Humphry Bogart says something like that in The Maltese Falcon.”

  Timothy Riordan blinked. Clete grabbed the frame of the nine-millimeter and twisted and simultaneously kicked him in the shin. Then he twisted some more, until Timothy’s face folded in upon itself and a simpering voice rose from his mouth and tears slid from his eyes.

  It should have been over. The gun was on the floor. Clete had his blackjack halfway out of his coat pocket. Then it caught on the flap, and in two seconds Timothy had a stiletto in his hand, the blade oiled and rippling with light and streaked with the whisker-like marks of a whetstone. He sank it in Clete’s arm.

  Clete felt the blade strike bone. A wave of nausea swept through his body. His loins turned to water; his sphincter started to cave.

  He tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work. His fist landed in the middle of Timothy’s face, slinging blood on a lamp shade, probably breaking his nose and front teeth, bouncing him off the wall. Clete pulled the stiletto from his arm and flung it across the room, then stomped Timothy’s head with the flat of his shoe and dragged him to a side window and crashed him headfirst through the venetian blinds and glass. He left him hanging half outside, like a giant clothespin.

  Ray was trying to get up from the bathroom floor, propping himself with one arm on the toilet. Clete kicked his feet out from under him. “This has been a lot of fun,” he said. “I really dig your threads. Keep a cool stool. But if you even look at Li’l Face, I’ll pull your teeth, Keith. Or make you real dead, Fred. Have a nice night.”

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, Clete sat with me on the back steps of the shotgun house I owned on Bayou Teche, deep in the shadows of oak trees that were two hundred years old. He was perhaps the most complex man I ever knew. His addictions and gargantuan appetites and thespian displays were utilized by his enemies to demean and trivialize and dismiss him. His vulnerability with women—or, rather, his adoration of them—led him again and again into disastrous affairs. The ferocity of his violence put the fear of God into child abusers and rapists and misogynists, but it was also used against him by insurance companies and law enforcement agencies that wanted him buri
ed in Angola.

  He was the trickster of folklore, a modern Sancho Panza, a quasi-psychotic jarhead who did two tours in Vietnam and came home with the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts and memories he shared with no one. Few people knew the real Clete Purcel or the little boy who lived inside him, the lonely child of an alcoholic milkman who made his son kneel all night on rice grains and whipped him regularly with a razor strop. Nor did they know the man who served tea on his fire escape to a mamasan he accidently killed. Nor did they know the NOPD patrolman who wept when he couldn’t save the child he wrapped in a blanket, ran through flames, and crashed through a second-story window with, landing on top of a Dumpster.

  Maybe his collective experience was responsible for an even more bizarre aspect of his personality. Years ago he tore a black-and-white photograph from a pictorial history of World War II and carried it inside a celluloid pouch in his wallet. The photograph showed a stooped woman walking up a dirt road with her three small daughters. The woman and the children wore rags tied on their heads and cheap coats on their backs. The smallest child was little more than a toddler. The viewer could not see what was at the end of the road. There were no trees or grass in the background, only an electric fence. The photograph was taken at Auschwitz. The cutline in the photo stated that the woman and her children were on their way to the gas chamber.

  Once, when Clete and I were hammered in Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room, I asked him why he would want to carry such a gruesome photo on his person.

  “So I don’t forget,” he said.

  “The Holocaust?”

  “No, the guys who ran those places. I’d like to get my hands on some guys like that. Maybe some of those neo-Nazis marching around with the Confederate flag.”

  I don’t think Clete was talking just about Nazis. He hated evil and waged war against it everywhere he found it. I sometimes wondered if he was an archangel in disguise, one with strings of dirty smoke rising from his wings, a full-fledged participant in fighting the good fight of Saint Paul. Maybe that was a foolish way to think, but I never knew anyone else like him. Trying to explain his origins was a waste of time. The way I saw it, if Clete Purcel didn’t have biblical dimensions, who did?

  His left arm was in a sling; his right hand was curved around a sixteen-ounce Styrofoam cup of coffee. The trees were dripping, the bayou swollen and yellow and carpeted with rain rings.

  “Those two guys didn’t dime you?” I said.

  “They don’t want to lose their meal ticket. Down the line, they’ll hire a third party to come after me.”

  “What’s Li’l Face doing around here?”

  “She lives with her aunt in the Loreauville quarters. Dave?”

  I knew what was coming.

  “The two guys I bounced around?” he said. “The word is they work for Mark Shondell. We need to chat him up.”

  “Noooo,” I said, making the word as round as I could.

  “You know the big problem you got here in New Iberia? Shintoism. You should get rid of all your churches and start building Japanese temples.”

  “Leave Mr. Shondell alone.”

  His face was serene, the part in his little-boy haircut as straight as a ruler. “Mr. Shondell? Wow.”

  I stared at the bayou, my hands hanging between my knees.

  “I’m not letting you off the hook, Streak. What about the girl, what’s-her-name, Isolde Balangie?”

  “What about her?” I said.

  “Is she missing or not?”

  “Not officially.”

  “You checked with the locals?”

  “I got my badge pulled. I’m not renewing old relationships these days.”

  He wagged his finger in my face. “See? The Balangies and the Shondells are making a deal of some kind, and they’re using a teenage girl to do it. You’re going to leave her twisting in the wind?”

  “That knife wound could have been in your neck.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  I took a breath. “You have to promise me something: I talk, you listen.”

  “I’m a fly on the wall. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He pressed one hand on my shoulder and stood up, his posture erect, his face lit by the sun. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “What is?” I said.

  “The world. It’s beautiful. Sometimes you got to stop and take inventory and appreciate the good deal you’ve got.”

  I had no idea what he meant. But that was Clete—a man with Janis Joplin and the full-tilt boogie in his head and a black-and-white photo in his wallet that most people would try to acid-rinse from their memory. “Coming?” he said.

  * * *

  MARK SHONDELL LIVED up the bayou among live oaks hung with Spanish moss in a glass-and-steel home of his own design, one that was as alien to our plantation culture as a spaceship. When he was much younger, he had been a co-producer of eighteen Hollywood B movies and had lost a fortune. When he left Los Angeles for the last time, he supposedly said, “One day I will destroy Hollywood. And the Jews who run it.”

  He was an eccentric, a scholar, a technocrat, a graduate of the Sorbonne, and a recluse. Some said his ancestors were nobility from the Italian Piedmont and allies of the Borgias; others said the Shondells descended from Huguenots who delighted in smashing Catholic icons; at least one Shondell had been a member of the Vichy government after France’s surrender to Hitler.

  Mark Shondell was forty and certainly handsome and distinguished in his bearing and carriage. Externally, he was kind and deferential and reticent, never given to offense. But he dined alone in our restaurants and did not entertain. His contributions to charity were given without ceremony. His gentility and the solipsistic distance in his eyes were such that people of humble origins were intimidated by him and often could not speak to him without a catch in the throat.

  Unlike many in our state, he did not earn his wealth from the petroleum and chemical industry and the culture that produced Cancer Alley, a study in environmental degradation. The Shondells owned freighters and sailing yachts and plantations in Chile and Costa Rica and Colombia. Latin American dictators whose military uniforms tinkled with medals visited his home with regularity.

  His genteel affectations and his cosmopolitan education aside, he had peculiarities that I didn’t understand. He wore multiple rings, as though some flaw in his lineage made him blind to ostentation. His eye wandered when a girl too young for him walked by. In a restaurant, he often bent to his food and scooped it into his mouth. Or he might use a toothpick while still at the table, shielding it with one hand, then leave it on the plate like a statement of contempt.

  Clete and I turned in to his driveway and parked in front of the porch. His gardens were blazing with rosebushes and hibiscus and bougainvillea, the shady areas soft with blue and pink hydrangea, the base of the tree trunks ringed with four-o’clocks and caladiums. The steel and glass in his three-story home seemed to pull the sunlight out of the sky. I went to the porch and pushed the doorbell with my thumb. Shondell answered as though he’d expected us, although I had not called in advance.

  “Come on in, Dave,” he said. “Your friend also. I have to be going shortly, but it’s always good to see you.”

  “I’m Clete Purcel,” Clete said, stepping inside, his gaze sweeping the spacious rooms. “Dave and I both worked Homicide at NOPD.”

  Shondell was dressed in a blue suit and a French-vanilla shirt with ruby cuff links. His face looked older than his years, but in a mature way, as though his wisdom were a gift and not an acquisition that takes a toll on the spirit. He waved at the white leather furniture in the living room. “Please sit down. Tell me what I can do for you.”

  “We’re worried about a teenage girl named Isolde Balangie,” Clete said before I could reply. “Last time anybody saw her, she was watching your nephew Johnny on an amusement pier over in Texas.”

  I wanted to kill him.

  “I have no knowledge about that,” Shondell said.

  “Then I
had trouble with a couple of PIs who were bird-dogging her and Dave,” Clete said. “That’s how I got this hole in my arm.”

  This was Clete’s idea of a fly-on-the-wall methodology.

  Shondell was seated across from us. He folded his hands. “Dave, can you clarify this for me? I’m truly lost.”

  “It’s as Clete says. I saw Isolde Balangie at the pier. She claimed your nephew was delivering her to you.” I had to cough when I finished the last sentence.

  “There’s a misunderstanding here,” he said. “Tell you what. I was preparing a brunch for some friends. Let’s have a bite and talk this thing out. I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said.

  “It certainly is. I’ll be right back.”

  You didn’t argue with Mark Shondell. He gave an order or lifted a finger and robbed people of their words before they could speak. Are the very rich very different from you and me? What an absurdity. How about this as a better question: In what way are they similar to us?

  Through the sliding glass doors, I could see a man weeding a flower bed on his knees, his back to us, a frayed wide-brim straw hat shading his features. I heard wheels squeaking on the carpet, then saw a white-jacketed black man pushing a serving cart out of the kitchen. It carried trays of bacon and ham and scrambled eggs and a pitcher of orange juice and one of tomato juice; it also carried bottles of rum, brandy, and vodka, clinking with the motion of the cart.