A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “You could hear from inside the locker?” I said.

  “Yes, suh,” she said. “Tee Boy couldn’t understand why the man was mad at him. He kept saying, ‘I ain’t got no truck wit’ you.’ Then there was five or six shots. The man said, ‘How you like that, nigger?’ ”

  I saw Helen’s cruiser pull up in front. I patted Emily Thibodaux on the back and went into the kitchen. Tee Boy was lying on his side, his face in the shadow of the stove. The wounds were tightly grouped in the center of his chest. The brass on the floor was probably nine-millimeter. The closest shell to the body was six feet away. I realized Helen was standing behind me. “What’s your witness say?” she asked.

  “The shooter was asking about Clete,” I said. “He insulted her. She spat in his pie and bragged to the cook about it. Our guy overheard the conversation and went nuts and started shooting.”

  “He shot the surveillance cameras, too,” Helen said. She looked at the grouping of the wounds in Tee Boy’s chest and the distance of the shells from the victim. “Think we have a pro?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “Did you talk to Clete yet?”

  “Haven’t had time.”

  “This is his late-night hangout when he’s not in the slop chute. That means our guy knows Clete’s routine. Get on it. I’ll do the notification.”

  “You know Tee Boy’s family?”

  “For twenty years. Tell Clete we want this guy alive.”

  * * *

  I WENT TO CLETE’S cottage at the motor court. It was still raining, the oak trees dripping with it, the bayou high and yellow, the surface lighted by an arc lamp on the opposite shore. There was a boom of thunder that shook the water out of the trees. I wondered if, out in the darkness, Gideon was on his galleon, waiting to come back into our lives, adding more souls to his vessel of pain and despair.

  I banged on Clete’s door. He answered in his boxer shorts and a strap undershirt. “Why don’t you wake me up in the middle of night?” he said.

  I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. “I would have waited till morning, but I thought you might be in danger.”

  “How?” he said.

  I told him every detail of the shooting: the terrorization of the waitress, the homeless man walking into a bullet that blew his brains on the restroom door, the five rounds pumped methodically into Tee Boy’s chest, the colorless eyes of the shooter, the ill-matched three-piece suit, the spit-shined boots, the language the shooter used to degrade Emily Thibodaux. I also told him about Mark Shondell’s attempt to involve his nephew Johnny with the people who wanted to undo nineteenth-century history.

  “I can’t process all this,” Clete said. He was sitting on the bed, still in his underwear. “What does Shondell have to do with the Civil War, and how is that connected with the shooting at the café?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, forget Shondell for a minute. The shooter sounds like a guy named Delmer Pickins. He works out of Amarillo and Dallas and beats up hookers and does hits most pros won’t deal with. I saw him at Benny Binion’s World Series of Poker a couple of times. But I never talked to him, and he’s got no reason to be looking for me.”

  “What do you mean by ‘hits most pros won’t deal with’?”

  “He’ll cowboy anyone for five grand. He does revenge hits and takes pictures for the client.”

  “Can you get in touch with him?”

  “A guy who wants to kill me?”

  “How about cooling it on the irritability?” I said.

  “Dave, you’re not hearing me. Pickins is the bottom of the septic tank. Whoever hired him did it because he’s a sadist and bat-shit crazy. He’s also disposable. Know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “If Delmer Pickins is our guy, he’s after both of us. Or the guy who hired him is.”

  I knew where Clete was going, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I know Adonis Balangie and Mark Shondell would like to take you off at the neck,” he said. “You got it on with Adonis’s wife—sorry, his companion he never sleeps with—and with his regular punch who he bought a house for. You also took time out to slap Mark Shondell’s face in public.”

  “So I’m the one to blame?”

  “You didn’t let me finish. I think this is about money. Or power. Adonis isn’t going to hire an ignorant peckerwood like Pickins. This Confederate-statue stuff is the issue. Look, Eddy Firpo had neo-Nazis in his house. Mark Shondell is an elitist and closet racist if I ever saw one. We’re living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn’t mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “What, about the Herd?”

  “Yeah. People are better than that.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” he said.

  He got up from the bed and opened the icebox. He pulled out two cans and threw one to me. It was a Diet Dr Pepper. He popped his can and drank from it. “You know how many times you’ve said maybe the South should have won the Civil War?”

  “I wasn’t serious.”

  “You fooled me. Come on, noble mon. You hate political correctness as much as I do. How about the poor fuck who lost his job because of affirmative action? Here’s a guy who gets a bolt of lightning in the head because of somebody else’s mistakes.”

  “I’m the target because of my influence on Johnny Shondell?” I replied.

  “No, because you’re intelligent and you’ll give Shondell a hard time politically. Not many people can do that. Plus, he’s a scorpion.”

  I sat down next to Clete on the bed. I hadn’t opened my cold drink, and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.

  “So why would Shondell send a hitter after you?” I said.

  “To get me out of the way so they can go after you unhampered.”

  “I think it’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Gideon was sent to burn you alive, Clete. Now this creep Pickins is in town. It’s you they’re after. There’s something in you that’s a threat to them. We just don’t know what it is.”

  “Yeah, they’re jealous of my waistline. Where do you dig up this stuff, Dave?”

  That was Clete, never able to understand the repository of virtue that lived inside him. He went to the sink and poured his Dr Pepper down the drain. “I’ll get some sheets and a blanket for the couch. You need to get some rest, noble mon. We’ll watch a film. I just rented The Passion of Joan of Arc, made in 1928. I’ve seen it three times. God, that girl was brave.”

  * * *

  MOST NEUROSCIENTISTS BELIEVE that 95 percent of the human mind is governed by the unconscious. I believe them, because that is the only way I have ever been able to understand the behavior of my fellow man. Jonathan Swift said man was a creature “capable” of reason. I think he had it right. I believe that most human activity is not rational and is often aimed at self-destruction. I also believe that ordinary human beings will participate in horrific deeds if they are provided a ritual that will allow them to put their conscience in abeyance.

  I have many memories I can suppress during daylight but which come aborning at night: a battalion aid station in a tropical country, helicopter blades thropping overhead, the raw smell of blood and feces, a man calling for his mother, his entrails blooming from his stomach as though it had been unzipped. The garish images from the aid station are to be expected. But I have another kind of dream, one that frightens and depresses me far more than my experiences in Vietnam.

  I witnessed two electrocutions in the Red Hat House at Angola Prison, in both cases at the request of the condemned. The building was constructed in the 1930s to house the most dangerous convicts on t
he farm. They wore filthy black-and-white-striped uniforms and red straw hats and worked double time on the levee under a boiling sun from first bell count until lockup. More than a hundred convicts were buried in that levee, some of them shot just for the amusement of a notorious gun bull.

  Later, the Red Hat House became the home of Angola’s electric chair, known as Gruesome Gertie. The fact that I’d watched passively while a man was cooked alive had a peculiar effect on my life. It did not fit with my perception of the supposed democracy in which I lived. A man wearing waist and leg chains was delivered to the unit by the same people who had fed and cared for him for years on death row. The warden, a rotund man with a hush-puppy accent, oversaw the ritual; also in attendance were the prison chaplain, a physician, two journalists, and what was called “the team,” employees of the state who wore charcoal-gray uniforms and red “boot” patches on their shirtsleeves, the boot appellation derived from Louisiana’s geographic shape.

  The executioner, a man I knew for many years, was called “the electrician.” Of all the people in the room, only he showed any emotion, and it was pure hatred for the men he launched into eternity. Not the kind of hatred that flared or the kind that caused people to rage or get drunk or strike others. His anger never left his eyes; there was never more of it and never less of it, as though he nursed it the way a professional drunkard nurses alcohol, the way a man can love a vice so much he dare not abuse it lest it be taken from him.

  The preparation of the condemned by the team was methodical. The condemned man’s head was shaved, his rectum packed with cotton, an adult diaper wrapped around his buttocks and genitals, a gown dropped over his body, slippers placed on his feet.

  The skin of both men was as gray as shirt board. Their glands seemed no longer able to secrete the juices that kept the tissue on their bones. There was dried mucus on their lips, dirt under their fingernails, razor scrapes in their stubble, and a sheen of fear in their eyes that was luminous. As I watched the preparations taking place a few feet away from the chair in which the condemned sat, I tried to keep in mind the severity of the crimes he had committed. But I couldn’t. I was consumed by the process, the detachment of the team, the specificity of each man’s work, all of it aimed at a pitiful wretch who watched their hands touching his skin, buckling the straps on his body, placing a saline-soaked sponge and caplike electrode on his shaved head, putting a lubricant and electrodes on his ankles, and finally, dropping a black cloth over his face so none of us would have to see its reconfiguration when the first jolt hit him.

  Each man’s body stiffened against the straps with such force I thought the oak in the chair would burst apart.

  The odor made me think of the laundry where my mother ironed clothes with women of color, inside a building that had no ventilation and no fans. I had a hard time swallowing and had to look at the floor a full minute before I stood up.

  I left both executions without speaking to anyone else in the room. On both occasions I rumbled across the cattle guard at the main gate and drove straight to a bar one mile down the two-lane and got swacked out of my mind. In twelve-step programs, pathetic drunkards such as I end up trying to figure out the nature of God, no matter how unknowledgeable we may be about such subjects. But the real mystery for me is not in the unseen but in the one at our fingertips: How is it we can do so much harm to one another as long as we are provided sanction? How is it we make marionettes of ourselves and give all power to those who have never heard a shot fired in anger or had even a glimpse of life at the bottom of the food chain?

  The day after the killings on the four-lane was Saturday. I woke up on Clete’s couch at ten A.M. Clete had left me a note that read, “Coffee on the stove, beignets in icebox. I’ll see if I can get a lead on Pickins. Don’t let those motherfuckers get behind you.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  THE TREES WERE still dripping, but the skies had cleared and the wind was cool and flowers were blooming in the yards along East Main. I showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes and checked in with Helen at the department and ate lunch at Victor’s, then returned home and called Alafair at Reed College in Portland.

  It’s hard to tell your child that you’re lonely and the child’s absence is a large part of the problem. In fact, I believe the inculcation of guilt in a child is a terrible thing. So I said nothing about my state of mind or the murders out on the highway, or the likelihood that either Clete or I would pay a price for our involvement in the feud between the Shondell and Balangie families.

  I had pulled Alafair from a downed plane out on the salt when she was five years old. Technically, she was an illegal, a refugee flown with her mother out of El Sal by a Maryknoll priest who died with the mother in the crash. I nicknamed her Baby Squanto for the Baby Squanto Indian books she read, and I watched her grow into a beautiful young woman who earned an academic scholarship to Reed but whose dreams still took her back to the day an army patrol came into her village and decided to create an example.

  I was about to end our conversation when she said, “Is everything okay, Dave? You sound funny.”

  “We had a double homicide out on the four-lane last night,” I said. “The shooter may have been after Clete.”

  “You need me there? I can get a flight this afternoon.”

  “We’re fine here.”

  “No, there’s something else wrong, isn’t there?”

  How do you tell your daughter about multiple encounters with a time traveler who was an executioner in the year 1600 and perhaps an adherent of Mussolini in the 1920s?

  “Dave, you tell me the truth or I’m coming home,” she said.

  “I’ve met someone,” I said to avoid opening a subject I would not be able to shut down.

  “Good. Who?”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “Who, Dave?”

  “The wife of Adonis Balangie, although she says she’s not his wife.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “I asked her to marry me. She didn’t seem in the mood. So I said adios.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “You miss Paris?”

  “I was only there a week. Don’t change the subject.”

  “We’ve got some bad stuff going on here, Alf,” I said. “I think it may involve evil entities. It’s hard to explain. I think Mark Shondell wants to kill Clete. I believe Shondell might be in league with the devil.”

  I don’t think I ever heard a longer silence in my life.

  * * *

  FATHER JULIAN WOKE almost every morning before dawn and jogged three miles along Ole Jeanerette Road, which paralleled Bayou Teche and traversed the emerald-green pastures of the LSU experimental farm. He had been an only child, and solitude had been a natural way of life for him long before his ordination. But rather than simplifying his life, ordination brought him complexities he had never envisioned. Early on he realized he would always be addressed by others as a condition, a cutout, an asexual waxwork standing at the church entrance, hands folded in piety as he welcomed his parishioners to morning Mass.

  He also learned that offending the hierarchy could get him buried in western Kansas. Among his superiors, compliance and sycophancy were often lauded, and mediocrity was rewarded. Father Julian Hebert was known as a “Vatican Two priest,” a liberal left over from the tenure of Pope John XXIII, which for many in his culture was like being known as Martin Luther.

  But he couldn’t blame all his problems on the authoritarian nature of the institution he served. In his private hours or in the middle of the night, he had to concede that many of the passions burning in him were not those of a spiritual man: the flashes of anger that left his face mottled; the bitterness he felt when he accepted injury or insult; the twitch in his right hand when he saw a child abused or heard a racist remark or watched a chain-saw crew mow down an oak grove in order to build another Walmart. Sometimes his efforts at self-control were not successful. Two years ago he had lost it.


  A large, sweaty off-duty policeman at a Lafayette health club was punching the heavy bag while he told a story to two other cops. Julian was hitting the speed bag and at first paid no attention to the story, then realized what he was hearing. “He took his dick out and rubbed it all over her,” the man said, steadying the bag, laughing so hard he was wheezing. “From top to bottom, I mean it, in her hair, everywhere.”

  Julian let his hands hang at his sides and stared at the floor. Finally, in the silence, the teller of the story looked at him and smiled crookedly. “Hey,” he said.

  “You’re a police officer?” Julian said.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “I’m Father Hebert. I’m okay at the speed bag. But I don’t have the moves for the ring. You look like you do.”

  “You’re a padre?”

  “I was when I woke up this morning.”

  “Sorry about the language.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “The moves?”

  “Yes,” Julian said. He opened his mouth to clear his eardrums; they were creaking, as though he were sinking to the bottom of a deep pool.

  “Rotate in a circle, see,” the man said. “Never lead with your right except in a body attack, then hook your opponent under the heart. Catch him with your left, then chop him with a right cross. It’s easy. Where’d you learn the speed bag?”

  Julian didn’t answer.

  “You hearing me?” the policeman said.

  “Yes,” Julian said.

  The policeman’s forearms were thick and wrapped with black hair, a fog of body odor wafting off his skin. “You really want me to show you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t deck me, now, Father,” the man said, grinning.

  Julian slipped on a pair of padded ring gloves, his eyes veiled.

  “Good. Let’s dance,” the man said.

  Julian had to breathe through his nose to slow down his heart. His skull felt as though it were in a vise. “Who was the woman?”