A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “He made two famous statements about tennis: ‘Doubles is a game of angles’ and ‘Women emasculate genius.’ I like the former more than the latter.”

  “What does that have to do with criminality?” I said.

  “It has to do with everything. And ‘criminality’ is a relative term.”

  I knew the argument and the rhetoric. The Mafia was no different than corporations. Prostitutes were sex workers and prostitution was a consensual and victimless activity. Marijuana was harmless. Sado-porn was protected by the First Amendment. Legalized gambling helped the poor. Blah-blah-blah.

  “Sell your lies to someone else, Adonis.”

  “I think you’re here for another reason.”

  I felt my stomach clench. I cleared my throat. I held my eyes on his. “Ms. Balangie came to New Iberia because she was terrified about her daughter.”

  “And you helped her out at your office?”

  Then I knew he knew. “She had a flat in front of my house. I changed her tire and asked her inside. I talked to her a long time. Then she left.”

  My mouth was dry, the wind cold on my face. A black man wearing a white jacket and white gloves put a tray of stuffed shrimp on the table. Adonis thanked him. The sprinkler system for the grounds came on. I could hear a jet of water striking the trunk of a palm tree.

  “Are you listening?” I said.

  “She told me. I’m not sure what I should do with you.”

  “Say that again?”

  “You may not have done anything wrong, but you thought about it. And the next time out, you will. It’s a matter of time, isn’t it?”

  I stood up. I wanted to pull him out of his chair. He bit into a shrimp and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “You’ve come uninvited to my table,” he said. “You’ve tried to embarrass me in front of my friends, and you’ve sullied my wife’s name in public. I’m going to let these things pass. But only once.”

  I could feel a tremble in my right hand, sense a flicker behind my eyes, a sound like a hummingbird in my ear. “The guy with the harelip tried to burn Clete Purcel to death, in his skivvies, hanging upside down from a steel hook. That same guy was carrying my address. I think you know who he is.”

  “You look a little tense. You’re not going to do something you’ll regret, are you?”

  “If I told you what I want to do, you’d be on your way home.”

  “Should I call security?”

  “Penelope is a nice lady. She did nothing wrong. That’s what I came here to say.”

  “You refer to my wife by her first name?”

  “She’s not your wife,” I said.

  The redness of the sun seemed to dance on his face, then he looked at me in the way a man does when he knows that one day he will have his revenge and that his victim in the meantime will be powerless to defend himself or to guess the moment when the blade will fall. This was what I had done to myself.

  The women returned from the clubhouse. Adonis picked up his racquet and walked onto the court. “Sorry to have kept you, ladies,” he said. “Let’s have at it, shall we? What a beautiful evening it is.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I DROVE OUT BY the golf course and parked under a tree and waited until the woman named Leslie emerged from the clubhouse and got in her car, an old Honda. She had changed into jeans and a snap-button denim shirt. It started to rain. I followed her up to Metairie into a 1950s subdivision lined with two-bedroom houses, all of them with the same gravel roofs and faux brick walls and lawns that resembled Astroturf.

  I waited at the end of the street while she parked in her driveway and went into the house. Before I could pull up, the front door opened again and I saw her give money to a teenage girl under the porch light. The girl got into a car and drove away. I waited until Leslie went back in the house, then I parked in front and stepped across a rain ditch and rang the bell. She opened the door, a sandwich in one hand. “My,” she said.

  “Could I talk with you a few minutes?”

  “What’s on your mind, cowboy?”

  I glanced at my slacks and shoes. “I look like a cowboy?”

  “Yeah, one who thinks he’s gonna get an easy ride.”

  “Wrong,” I said.

  “You probably don’t remember me,” she said.

  I felt the rain blowing on my neck. “You look familiar.”

  “I used to see you in the Quarter. You were a souse back then.”

  “Yeah, I remember now. You were a dancer in a joint on Bourbon.”

  “I didn’t dance. I just took it off.”

  “I remember,” I said. “Vividly.”

  She took a bite out of the sandwich. “Cute, but no can do, sweetie.”

  “No can do what?”

  “Let you pump me in multiple ways.”

  “You cut to it, don’t you?” I said. “Why’d you make a face at me with your finger in your mouth?”

  “I like to give limp-dicks a throb or two.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What, you think I’m a comedian?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Where’d you get the scar?” It looked like a flattened worm on her jawbone.

  “A pimp named Zipper Clum was in a bad mood.”

  “If it’s any consolation, a psychopath took Zipper’s arm off with a machete.”

  She combed back her hair with her fingers, her eyes still on mine. Her hair looked sprayed and stiff as wire. “Okay, honey bunny, let’s make it fast. I have a daughter to take care of.”

  She let me inside. I sat on the sofa while she went in back. She returned with a young girl in a reclining wheelchair. The girl rested on her side as though she were sleeping. “This is Elizabeth,” Leslie said. “Elizabeth, this is Mr. Robicheaux. He’s a friend of ours.”

  “Hello, Miss Elizabeth,” I said.

  The girl had her mother’s good looks and eyes that were as innocent and empty as blue water. Leslie turned on the television and inserted a video underneath. SpongeBob sprang to life on the screen. The girl made a mewing sound.

  “Come into the kitchen,” Leslie said.

  “I never got your last name.”

  “Rosenberg.”

  The house was old, but all the furniture, rugs, curtains, and appliances seemed new. I sat at the breakfast table. She opened the refrigerator. “I make Elizabeth a snack before bedtime. While I do that, you can tell me why you’re here. Then you leave.”

  “You know anything about Adonis’s stepdaughter? Her name is Isolde.”

  “I don’t ask him questions about his family.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  She gave me a look.

  “You’re just a tennis partner?” I said.

  “You’re about to get yourself invited back out the door.”

  She cut a piece of pie and put it on a plate with a spoon, then went into the living room. I knew I probably couldn’t imagine the amount of care she had to give her daughter, which I was sure involved changing diapers and bathing and feeding and dressing her, never having enough asleep, and ultimately accepting exhaustion as a way of life. In other words, I believed Leslie Rosenberg had her own Golgotha. She came back in the kitchen and washed the plate and spoon in the sink.

  “I’m not out to nail Adonis, Miss Leslie. I need to find Isolde. I think she’s a victim of human trafficking.”

  “What’s with the ‘miss’ routine?”

  “It’s a leftover courtesy from a gentler time.”

  “A little of that Aunt Jemima stuff goes a long way. Isolde Balangie is a victim of human trafficking? One of the richest teenage girls in New Orleans? Where do you get this stuff?”

  I had the feeling Leslie Rosenberg didn’t take prisoners. She sat down across from me. “You see all this? The house, everything that’s in it? It comes from the Balangie family.”

  “You work for them?”

  “I’m a cashier in one of their restaurants. They’re not white slavers.”

  “You and th
e other two ladies at the tennis courts bear a lot of similarities.”

  There was a beat. “You’re saying we’re collectibles?”

  “Adonis doesn’t do anything for free.”

  “How’d you like a slap across the face, cop or not?”

  “I think you’re heck on wheels, Ms. Rosenberg.”

  She rolled her fingertips against the heel of one hand. “You’re not going to be a problem, are you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She paused. “Want a piece of pie?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She got up and took the pie from the oven and set in on the counter, then sliced it with a knife, her back to me. She had the physicality of a working-class woman, as well as the confidence. She handed me a piece of pie on a plate.

  “Did you ever speak at the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said.

  “ ‘Oh, yeah’ what?”

  “I knew that one would catch up with me one day.”

  I remembered her in a much more detailed way now. She had been heavier, probably from a jailhouse diet, her hair much longer, partially dyed; she was just beginning the steps of the program. But I remembered her most for her candor. Women speakers are the most honest at A.A. meetings and often give histories about themselves that men do not want to hear, because they fear the same level of honesty will be required of them. Leslie Rosenberg went the extra mile and left nothing out. Had there been a parole officer at the meeting, she could have violated herself back to the Orleans Parish Prison.

  She ran away from home at age seventeen and hooked up with three outlaw bikers who gang-raped her on the way to Sturgis. She had an abortion in Memphis and spent three months in jail for soliciting at a truck stop on I-40. The next two stops were Big D and New Orleans and runway gigs with a G-string and pasties, then Acapulco and Vegas with oilmen who could buy Third World countries with their credit cards.

  Miami was even more lucrative. She went to work for a former CIA agent turned political operative who set up cameras in hotel rooms and blackmailed corporate executives and Washington insiders. She helped destroy careers and lives and woke up one morning next to the corpse of a married man who died from an overdose in his sleep and whose family she had to face at the police station. One week later, she swallowed half a bottle of downers, turned on the gas in the oven, and stuck her head in. Three weeks later, she slashed her wrists. One month after that, she helped a pimp roll a blind man.

  It’s not the kind of personal history you forget.

  “Something wrong with the pie?” she asked.

  “It’s good. Do you still go to meetings?”

  “Mostly to N.A. I was into drugs more than alcohol.”

  “Who’s the father of your little girl?”

  “The dead guy I woke up with. I think I said that at the meeting.”

  She waited for me to speak, but I didn’t.

  “You’re wondering why I had one abortion but not another one?” she said. “I figured I owed the guy something. Or his family. Shit if I know. Anyway, I love Elizabeth.”

  “Where does the Balangie family come in?” I said.

  “I moved back to New Orleans, and Penelope saw me at the clinic where I take Elizabeth. I told her my story. She introduced me to Adonis. That was it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Adonis.”

  “Try getting to know him.”

  “No strings attached?”

  “I’m going to say this only once,” she said, “and that’s because I don’t want you walking out of here with the wrong story. Adonis is a gentleman. He asks. You get my meaning?”

  “He asks?”

  “Yeah, fill in the blanks.”

  “You’re an intelligent woman. There’s something weird going on with the Balangies, and I have a feeling it bothers you.”

  She tried to stare me down.

  “You ever hear of a guy who has a face like a reptile?” I said.

  “No.”

  “A guy who enjoys breaking the necks of pimps?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  I was tired and the rain was blowing hard, the banana fronds outside pressing wetly against the glass. I knew I would probably hit high winds around Morgan City. I put on my coat.

  “Adonis told me something I didn’t understand,” she said.

  I waited.

  “He said to watch out for a guy who calls himself a revelator. I asked him what a revelator was. He said a guy with leather wings and a torture chamber for a brain.”

  “That’s all he would say?” I asked.

  “Then he said he was kidding and tried to shine me on.”

  “That’s the Adonis I know,” I said. “A guy who scares people to death, then refuses to explain himself.”

  “You don’t know anything about a revelator?”

  “Latter-day Saints use the term,” I said. “But I doubt Adonis hangs out with the Mormon Tabernacle crowd. Want my advice, Ms. Rosenberg?”

  “Drop the ‘miz’ crap.”

  “If Adonis gives away something, it’s for a reason. His father was the same way. The Balangies never forget a debt, an injury, or a favor. But the one they remember the most is the injury. Ask any prostitute from New Orleans to Galveston who tries to go independent.”

  “Boy, you’re the light of the world,” she said.

  “More like a dead bulb,” I replied. “Good night, Miss Leslie. Excuse me. Leslie. I think you’re probably a fine lady.”

  For just a moment her face softened and showed a vulnerability that didn’t go with anything she had told me.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you’re in the neighborhood.”

  “You mean drop by?”

  “Elizabeth likes you.”

  I said good night and ran through the rain to my unmarked car just as lightning leaped through the clouds and lit up the entire neighborhood. The tiny boxlike houses trembled like a cardboard replica of Levittown, then the darkness folded over them. It was one of those rare moments when the ephemerality of the human condition becomes inescapable and you want to smash your watch and shed your mortal fastenings and embrace the rain and the wind and rise into the storm and become one with its destructive magnificence.

  * * *

  DANA MAGELLI CALLED me from NOPD the next day. “Trying to get yourself smoked?” he said.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.

  “My sister-in-law plays tennis at the same courts as Adonis Balangie.”

  “I tried to force his hand.”

  “How’d that work?”

  “Guess,” I replied.

  “I’d go easy on that, Dave. But that’s not why I called,” he said. “A black woman named Sarah Gooding got stopped on St. Charles for a broken taillight. The patrolman ran her tag and found she had three bench warrants for traffic violations and one for soliciting. He also smelled weed inside the car. She had a little boy in the backseat and said she was leaving town. The officer searched her vehicle and found thirty thousand dollars in the trunk.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I talked to her. She tried to lie her way out of it. She said she’d saved the money over the years, and she and her son were moving to Mississippi. I explained to her that the bills had purple dye on them and were probably from a robbery. I also told her the prints on her sheet for the solicitation pinch matched prints we found in the taxi driven by the pimp who got his neck broken. That’s when she broke down.”

  “Wait a minute. You found her prints in the taxi driven by Melancon?”

  “No, I was lying to her.”

  “How about the dye on the money?”

  “That’s true. It’s not much, but it’s there. The serial numbers are not in the FBI database, so maybe the money is from a source that can’t report the loss.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “She said
Melancon would take her to hookups in the Quarter, in-and-out deals that didn’t have the approval of Adonis. The night Melancon got killed, the john was a guy with a face like a snake. He said his name was Gideon. He gave her the thirty grand.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Try to process this: She has to get out of the life. The john is a combo of Billy Graham and Reinhard Heydrich.”

  “It’s funny you used Heydrich’s name.”

  “What about it?” Dana said.

  “His middle name was Tristan.”

  “So what? Look, there’s something else. The black hooker says the john called himself a revelator. You ever hear anything like that?”

  “Yeah, last night, from a woman with ties to Adonis Balangie.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said Adonis warned her about a guy calling himself that.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “She’s not a player.”

  “Like Penelope Balangie is not a player?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “A ghoul was carrying your address,” he said. “While you’re busy inserting yourself into the Balangie family’s inner workings. Notice my choice of words.”

  “I appreciate your concern, Dana. But you’re mischaracterizing the situation.”

  “I tried.”

  “You ever deal with Mark Shondell?”

  “Shondell wouldn’t take the time to piss on us if we were burning to death,” he replied. “You never cease to astound me, Dave. Have a nice day.”

  The line went dead. In all the years I had known him, Dana Magelli had never hung up on me.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING I drove to the treatment center in North Baton Rouge where Johnny Shondell had checked in for a minimum stay of a month. I suspected one month would be for openers. You don’t have to die to visit Dante’s Ninth Circle. Junk is a culture unto itself. The body, the brain, and the soul are the property of the dealer. Street addicts knowingly inject themselves with AIDS and hepatitis rather than face withdrawal. When it comes to satisfying the addiction, no form of depravity is off the table. How does anyone get himself in that kind of shape? It’s easy. You’ve got snakes in your head, the rattling of Gatling guns in your ears, and a sense of despair as bottomless as the Grand Canyon, and voilà, here comes the candy man, who offers you a ride on the big white horse, and with just a little poke in the arm, you’re galloping through a field of flowers.