A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Adonis puckered his mouth. “Don’t trip on the hose. The things that hurt us are usually lying in the weeds, where we can’t see them. That’s an old Sicilian proverb.”

  * * *

  WE DROVE TO the French Quarter and parked Clete’s Caddy at his office and ate an early dinner at the Acme Oyster House on Iberville. We had spoken little after leaving the Balangie estate, in part because of anger and shame, whether we were willing to admit it or not. People whose wealth came from narcotics, prostitution, pornography, loan sharking, labor racketeering, and murder had eighty-sixed us as though we were low-rent ignorant flatfeet unworthy to be in their home.

  The other problem we had was figuring out Penelope Balangie’s attitude about the missing girl. I had no doubt Isolde was her daughter; they had the same mysterious eyes, and they both seemed to float on their own wind stream.

  While we waited for our oysters on the half shell, Clete kept tearing off bits of French bread and dropping them in a saucer of oil and vinegar.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “Penelope Balangie’s tom-toms. For a minute or two I thought my magic twanger was shifting into overdrive.”

  “Will you stop that?”

  “No normal guy can see a set of bongos like that without his pole going on autopilot, so stop pretending. Before it’s over, she’ll have Adonis sticking a gun in his mouth. She’s the kind that promises you a ride, then ties your schlong to a car bumper.”

  “Do you have to say everything through a bullhorn?”

  “Adonis isn’t going to let anything happen to the girl. Time for us to bow out.”

  “You’re right.”

  He raised his eyebrows, surprised at my reaction, and adjusted the sling on his left arm. He bit his lip.

  “You still have pain?” I said.

  “No,” he said, obviously lying. “By the way, you got to Adonis when you told him LaForchette was working for Shondell.”

  “I don’t feel too good about that,” I said.

  “Quit it. He treated us like shit. What I don’t get is why a broad with money and education and tatas like that would marry a greaseball notorious for following his stiff one-eye.”

  “Earlier you said he wasn’t a greaseball.”

  “I said he went to college. You’re always twisting things around. You know your problem? I mean your real problem?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “You think you can save people from themselves. That’s why you went to see LaForchette in Huntsville.”

  “That’s not why I went to see him.”

  “So why did you?”

  “I’ll tell you one day,” I said.

  He put a chunk of bread in his mouth and chewed. “Know what?”

  “What?”

  “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”

  “Until one of us gets shot.”

  “So don’t make the wrong choices with the wrong broad and get us into trouble. Face it, big mon. If I wasn’t around, your life would be a toilet. Am I right or wrong? It’s not an easy job, either. Show a little gratitude.”

  When we got back to the Caddy, all four tires were slashed, the taillights in the fins broken by a brick that lay on the asphalt. A note under the windshield wiper read, “This is for openers, queer-bait. I hope your arm hurts like a motherfucker. If you need a wrecker service this time of day, dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT.”

  “Shondell’s PIs? I said.

  “Who else?” Clete said. He crushed the note in his palm and tossed it at a sewer grate. “I should have popped both of them. How’d we get into this?”

  I pretended not to hear him.

  * * *

  I WAS EXHAUSTED WHEN I got home. My daughter, Alafair, was away, and the house creaked with wind and emptiness when I opened the bedroom window and lay down in the dark. I could hear tree frogs singing on the bayou and see the lights of the sugar mill reflected in the clouds. I closed my eyes and was soon asleep, hoping that in the morning I would free myself of the Shondells and the Balangies. But rather than find a degree of nocturnal peace, I dreamed of a dark sea on which galleons with either black or white sails slid down waves twenty feet high, the oars manned by half-naked convicts chained to the handles, foam exploding on the bows. The ships pitched with such ferocity that sometimes the oar blades struck in empty air. The expressions on the faces of the convicts could have been taken from paintings depicting the souls of the damned.

  I was awakened by the phone on the kitchen counter at 2:14 A.M. I put on my slippers and went into the kitchen without turning on the light; I looked at the caller ID. I didn’t recognize the number. I answered anyway. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a good man. I could see it in your face.”

  There was no mistaking the voice and accent. There was also no mistaking a thread of manipulation. “Ms. Balangie?”

  “I’m sorry to call. I need your help to get my daughter back.”

  I don’t know if my next question showed more concern for her or for me. “Are you at home?”

  “No. I’m at a—”

  “I don’t need to know.” I was so tired I thought my knees were about to give out. I sat in a chair and took a pencil and notepad from a drawer. “Are you safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me a number I can call tomorrow.”

  “You’re not going to contact Adonis, are you?”

  I thought again of the dream I’d just had. What did it mean? I had no idea. “No promises about anything, Ms. Balangie. Not about your daughter. Not about you. Not about your husband. Not about anything.”

  Chapter Six

  MY CALL TO her at midmorning went immediately to voicemail. I left the following message: “Miss Penelope, regarding your daughter’s situation, my advice is you contact the FBI. You should also contact the state police and the sheriff’s department in New Orleans. I don’t believe I can be of any other service to you.”

  I was sitting in the backyard with my cell phone, which I believed symbolized humankind’s latest attempt to control our lives and our fate. But I didn’t feel any control at all. The leaves were turning gold and red in the oak trees, rustling each time the wind scudded across the bayou’s surface. Robins that had just arrived from the north pecked in the grass, and the Teche was flowing at high tide through the pilings of the drawbridge at Burke Street. It was one of those Indian summer days in South Louisiana that is cold and warm simultaneously and makes you feel that the earth will abide forever. But on this day I felt there was a hole in my life I would never fill, an ache that had no source. Death is not a transitory or incremental presence. It swallows you whole.

  I went inside and began fixing breakfast. Fifteen minutes later, I heard an automobile turn in to my gravel driveway, the tires clicking. I looked through the window and saw Penelope Balangie behind the wheel of a maroon Ferrari convertible, the top down. She wore black sunglasses and a white silk scarf on her head. I went out the door and walked across the lawn, my unraked leaves crackling under my shoes.

  “How did you know where I live?” I said.

  “Asked.”

  “I left a message. You didn’t retrieve it?”

  “No,” she said. “What did you wish to tell me?”

  “I appreciate your situation, but I don’t want to have any more to do with it. Call the FBI or a state or parish agency.”

  “Adonis says ‘FBI’ stands for ‘Forever Bothering Italians.’ ”

  “That’s what most of the wiseguys say. That’s because they’re dumb. And because they’re dumb, and I mean stupid-to-the-core incapable of thought, most of them end up in jail.”

  She removed her sunglasses. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her skin was pale and puckered around the eyes. “What made you change your mind?” she said.

  “Change my mind about what?”

  “You tried to help Isolde. Now you regret it.”

  “Y
ou’ve got it wrong, Miss Penelope. I talked to her on an amusement pier, then got harassed by a couple of bird dogs who work for Mark Shondell. That’s when Clete Purcel stepped in and got a stiletto stuck in his arm. The same guys slashed all four of his tires after we left your home.”

  “You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I thought you’d understand.”

  “Understand what? That you gave away your daughter in some kind of political deal with the Shondells?”

  “We made peace with them. My family subsidizes charities all over the Third World. Mark Shondell has a chance to do a great deal of good rather than harm.”

  “It sounds more like human trafficking.”

  She got out of the car as though she’d been slapped. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that.”

  “Sorry, I have my own problems. Your husband is a gangster. So were his father and grandfather. I don’t like your husband, and I didn’t like his father or his grandfather. They give your people a bad name. Why don’t y’all wise up?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Robicheaux, but that’s a ridiculous statement.” She stepped closer to me. She seemed small and absolutely determined and unafraid; she looked up at my face. “Your government doesn’t run a gulag of torture chambers? It doesn’t make deals with the Saudis and the junta in Argentina? Stop embarrassing yourself. You have no idea how many people are dependent on us for their survival, both in Italy and in this country. My family has been loyal to the unfortunate for five hundred years.”

  Her eyes were burning. I could hear myself breathing. “Take a stroll with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Down the street. I’ll give you a history lesson.”

  We walked down East Main through the tunnel of live oaks that led to the Shadows, a two-story pillared brick home built in the early 1830s, galleried and hung with floor-to-ceiling storm shutters, now a tourist stop surrounded by a piked fence and a bamboo border. We walked onto the grounds, in deep shade, and around back where the lawn sloped down to the bayou. The drawbridge at Burke Street was on our left; people of color were fishing under it, all of them sitting on inverted buckets, as their ancestors had probably sat there 150 years ago. The tide was in, and the tops of the elephant ears on the mudbank were almost underwater, rippling like a green carpet on the current.

  “It’s a fine-looking place, isn’t it?” I said. “William Faulkner and Henry Miller were friends of the owner and used to visit here. Tourists love it. But here’s the real story. Three hundred slaves did the work. You see their graves anywhere? They’re fertilizer in a field or under a dry-goods store. The wife of the owner was known as a good person who refused to flee the Yankees in 1863 for fear the black people who were sick would have no one to care for them. But that doesn’t change the fact that slavery was evil.”

  “I think that is the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me. You’re saying this about my relationship to Isolde?”

  “People aren’t chattel. There’s nothing noble about controlling the lives of other people, Miss Penelope. You’re an intelligent and educated woman. What in the name of suffering God are you and Adonis doing?”

  “If I were a man, I would knock you down.”

  “The question still stands.”

  The wind was wimpling the bayou, bending the cattails, swelling inside the live oaks. She took the scarf from her head and shook out her hair. She tilted up her chin. “I can pay you.”

  “Nope.”

  “I think Isolde and the Shondell boy may have gone to a recording studio in Alabama. The Rolling Stones recorded there.”

  “Then let them have some fun. Get Isolde away from Mark Shondell. He’s the scum of the earth.”

  “Do you know how many people have died in the feud between our families?”

  “Not interested.”

  “I thought better of you.”

  “Think what you wish. I don’t like cleaning up other people’s mess. Particularly your husband’s.”

  “You keep your mouth off him.”

  “Gladly,” I said.

  Her eyes were wet. I had thoughts and feelings about her that I don’t want to admit. Tingling in the hands, dryness in the throat, desires that hide in the subconscious. She had a strong and solid figure and clear skin and a bold stare that was both intelligent and principled, and she carried herself like a princess; she was obviously not an ordinary woman and not a follower of fashion and was lovely to look at and yet somehow vulnerable at the same time. For most men, this is a combo that turns into a sure bear trap, but it’s one that’s hard to resist and, let’s face it, often worth the trouble. There was only one problem: She was another man’s wife.

  “Why do you have that funny look on your face?” she said.

  “I think you’re an admirable lady, Miss Penelope.”

  “But you won’t help?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then I’ll walk myself back to my car.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I cupped my hand on her elbow. “The sprinklers are on. I’ll walk you along the slope to my house. Things will work out for you. I’m sure they will.”

  Her forearm felt as light as air in my palm as I stepped over the gnarled roots of the bamboo that grew wild along the bayou. I wondered if my gentlemanly conduct was a sham and a way to deceive myself and take me across the wrong Rubicon, a feat that in the past I achieved only by getting drunk.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, I got a call from the sheriff of Vermilion Parish. “We’ve got a couple of guys in a weighted barrel, Dave. Or rather, I think it’s a couple. One of them had a picture of your house in his phone.”

  “Say again?”

  “I’m a little bit southeast of Henry. I could use your he’p.”

  A half hour later, I drove my truck up on a levee that overlooked the northern tip of Vermilion Bay. Two cruisers were already there, as well as an ambulance and a state police boat. The sun on the bay looked like a flame on a bronze shield. A polyethylene tarp had been pulled over a large metal barrel lying on its side. The sheriff walked toward me. He was a fat man named Eli Guidry. He wore rubber boots that were slick with mud, the trouser legs stuffed inside. The coroner had not arrived.

  “Take a deep breath,” Eli said. “I think these poor bastards were ripe befo’ they went into the water.”

  He peeled back the tarp, first off the barrel, then off the contents that had been piled outside it. I stepped back from the stench and the cloud of bottle flies and the crabs skittering on the sand.

  “A fisherman hung his anchor on the cinder blocks,” he said. “You ever work one like this?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Think it was a chain saw?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “One has gold hair,” Eli said. “Know who that might be?”

  “Ray Haskell.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An ex-cop. A hard case. Called himself a PI. I think he was just a dirty cop.”

  “How about this other guy?”

  “Timothy Riordan. Same history.”

  “Why would a picture of your house be in the phone?” Eli said.

  “Which guy was carrying it?”

  “The one still got part of a suit coat on.”

  “That’s Haskell. He was the one with the brains.”

  “You ain’t answered my question.”

  “They were bird-dogging me. I got in their face about it. They probably wanted to square it.”

  “Bird-dogging you why?”

  “You got me,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “Neither one of them was real bright.”

  “Don’t know anyone who might want to do this to them?”

  I shook my head and looked out at the bay.

  “Wish you had your shield back, Dave.”

  “I’m not a big loss to the department.”

&nb
sp; “You’re not holding back on me, are you?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  Eli was a good guy but not someone you talked with about the realities of the system we served and the corruption that hovered on its edges. I moved upwind from the body parts that had been poured from the barrel. I tried not to think about how these men had died. Were they alive when they were cut up? Did they weep? Did they betray each other? I had seen men cry out for their mothers in a battalion aid station. Did these men do the same?

  “What are you thinking about?” Eli asked.

  “Nothing worth talking about.”

  “What are you not telling me, podna?”

  “These guys worked for Mark Shondell. Talk to him if you like.”

  There was a beat. “Mr. Shondell is involved in this?”

  I didn’t answer. Eli’s face had gone empty. “Dave, I’m axing you again. We’re talking about the Mr. Shondell that lives in New Iberia?”

  “The one and only.”

  He looked past me at the levee. His eyes were dead. Then he saw an automobile coming on the levee. “There’s the coroner now. You been real he’pful. Coming out and all. I’ll be checking wit’ you later.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT EVENING Clete called me from New Orleans. It was dark outside, the rain drumming so hard on the roof I could hardly hear his voice. “Hey!” he said.

  “Hey, what?”

  “A musician on Bourbon told me Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie were recording for three days in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A place called Fame Studios.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “Penelope Balangie told me.”

  “She called you?”

  “She was in New Iberia.”

  “What’s going on, big mon?”

  “Nothing. End of subject,” I said. “You heard about those two PIs?”

  “Yeah, I was all broke up.”

  “Has anybody tried to question you?”

  “Because I had a run-in with them?”

  “Because one of them put a knife in you,” I said.

  “I’m keeping myself unavailable. Let’s get back to Penelope Balangie. You’re not letting those lovely tatas get to you, are you?”