“Ole Troy didn’t want to unburden his sins?” the second deputy, the one named Pitts, said.
Shockly pulled on his nose to hide his irritation at his friend’s revelation of their shared agenda.
“Nice seeing you guys,” I said.
Neither one of them said good-bye as I walked away. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, they were still standing in the parking lot, wondering, I suspect, if they had said too much or too little.
I decided I needed to talk to Troy again, when the two sheriff’s deputies were not around. I checked into a motel in the next town, then returned to the hospital at sunrise, but Troy had died during the night.
I WAS A WIDOWER and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.
After I returned from my visit to Troy’s bedside, I could not get Ida Durbin out of my head. I tried to convince myself that the past was the past, that Ida had involved herself with violent and predatory people and that her fate was neither my doing nor Jimmie’s.
But over the years I had seen the file drawer slammed on too many unsolved disappearances. These cases almost always involved people who had no voice and whose families had no power. Sometimes a determined cop would try to keep the investigation alive, revisiting his files and chasing leads on his own time, but ultimately he, too, would make his separate peace and try not to think, as I was now, about voices that can cry out for help in our sleep.
I had no demonstrable evidence that a crime had actually been committed, nothing except the statement of a guilt-driven man who said he had seen blood on a chair decades ago. Even if I wanted to initiate an investigation, where would I start? In a Texas coastal town where most of the players were probably dead?
I had another problem, too. For a recovering alcoholic, introspection and solitude are the perfect combination for a dry drunk, a condition that for me was like putting a nail gun in the center of my forehead and pulling the trigger.
I mowed the grass in the front yard and began raking up layers of blackened leaves on the shady side of the house, burning them in a rusty oil barrel under the oak trees down by the bayou. A speedboat went by with water-skiers in tow, churning a frothy yellow trough down the center of the bayou. On the far bank, in City Park, the camellias were in bloom, kids were playing baseball, and families were fixing lunch in the picnic shelters. But I couldn’t shake the gloom that had clung to me like cobwebs since I had listened to Troy Bordelon’s deathbed statement.
I went back in the house and read the newspaper. The lead story was not a happy one. Thirty miles from New Iberia, the body of a young black woman, bound at the wrists and ankles, had been found in a cane field, not far from the convent in Grand Coteau. Her car was discovered only two miles away, at a rural cemetery where she had been visiting her brother’s grave site, the driver’s door ajar, the engine still idling.
In the last six months two women had been abducted in Baton Rouge and their bodies dumped in wetlands areas. The murder of the black woman in Grand Coteau bore similarities to the homicides in Baton Rouge, except this was the first time the killer, if indeed the same perpetrator murdered all three women, had struck in the area we call Acadiana.
A one-paragraph addendum to the wire-service story mentioned that over thirty women in the Baton Rouge area had been murdered by unknown perpetrators in the last decade.
Clete Purcel, my old friend from NOPD, had opened a branch of his P.I. business in New Iberia, and was now dividing his time between here and his office on St. Ann in New Orleans. He claimed he was simply expanding his business parameters, but in truth Clete’s shaky legal status and his penchant for creating chaos and mayhem wherever he went made instant mobility an imperative in his day-to-day existence.
How many cops have longer rap sheets than most of the criminals they put in the can? Over the years, some of Clete’s antics have included the following: forcing an entire dispenser of liquid hand soap down a button man’s mouth in the men’s room of the Greyhound bus depot; leaving a drunk U.S. congressman handcuffed to a fire hydrant on St. Charles Avenue; filling a gangster’s convertible with cement; dangling a gang-banger by his ankles off a fire escape five stories above the street; driving an earthmover back and forth through Max Calveci’s palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain; stuffing a billiard ball inside the mouth of a child molester; parking a nine-Mike round in the brainpan of a federal snitch; and, top this, possibly pouring sand in the fuel tank of an airplane, causing the deaths of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio and a few of his hired gumballs.
More unbelievably, Clete did all these things, and many others, in a blithe, carefree spirit, like a unicorn on purple acid crashing good-naturedly through a clock shop. He was out of sync with the world, filled with self-destructive energies, addicted to every vice, still ridden with dreams from Vietnam, incredibly brave, generous, and decent, the most loyal man I ever knew, and ultimately the most tragic.
What Victor Charles and the NVA couldn’t do to him, or the Mob or his enemies inside NOPD, Clete had done to himself with fried food, booze, weed, whites on the half shell, and calamitous affairs with strippers, junkies, and women who seemed to glow with both rut and neurosis. Sometimes I believed his dreams were not about Vietnam but about his father, a milkman in the Garden District who thought parental love and discipline, the latter administrated with a whistling razor strop, were one and the same. But no amount of pain, either inflicted by himself or others, ever stole his grin or robbed him of his spirit. For Clete, life was an ongoing party, and if you wanted to be a participant, you wore your scars like crimson beads at Mardi Gras.
Clete lived on Main, too, farther down the bayou, in a stucco 1940s motor court, set back from the street in deep shade. Because it was Sunday, I found him at home, reading in a deck chair, his glasses perched on his nose, his leviathan body glistening with suntan oil. An iced tomato drink with a stick of celery floating in it rested on the gravel by his chair. “What’s the haps, noble mon?” he said.
I told him about my visit to Troy’s bedside and how Jimmie and I met Ida Durbin in Galveston on the Fourth of July in 1958. I told him about the beating Jimmie gave the pimp, Lou Kale, and how Ida disappeared as though she had been sucked through a hole in the dimension.
Clete was a good investigator because he was a good listener. While others spoke, his face seldom showed expression. His eyes, which were smoky green, always remained respectful, neutral, occasionally shifting sideways in a reflective way. After I had finished, he ticked a fingernail at a scar that ran diagonally through his left eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose. “This guy Troy was working with pimps?” he said.
“The uncle was a cop on a pad. Troy was evidently a tagalong,” I said.
“But he believed they killed the girl?”
“He didn’t say that,” I replied.
“House girls are full-time cash on the hoof. Their pimps usually don’t kill them.”
But Clete knew better. He raised his eyebrows. “Dave, a thousand things could have happened. Why think the worst? Besides, if there’s any blame, it’s on your half-crazy brother. Remodeling a pimp’s face on behalf of a whore probably isn’t the best way to do P.R. for her.”
He laughed, then looked at my expression. “Okay, mon,” he said. “If you want to scope it out, I’d start with Bordelon’s ties to other people. Run that by me again about the two sheriff’s deputies.”
“They braced me in the hospital parking lot.”
“They thought Bordelon gave up somebody?”
“That was my impression.”
“So Troy Bordelon’s family is—”
“They do scut work for the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.”
Clete removed the celery stalk from his drink and took a long swallow from the glass. His hair was sandy, with strands of white in it, cut like a little boy’s. When the vodka and tomato juice hit his stomach, the color seemed to bloom in his face. He looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight.
“I have crazy thoughts about going back to ’Nam sometimes, finding the family of a mamasan I killed, apologizing, giving them money, somehow making it right,” he said. He looked emptily out into the sunlight.
“What are you saying?”
“I’d let sleeping dogs lie. But you won’t do that. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. Not ole Streak,” he replied, pressing the bottom of his glass hard into the moist gravel.
CLETE WAS WRONG. I disengaged from thoughts about Ida Durbin. During the week, I bass-fished on Bayou Benoit, repaired the roof on the shotgun house I had just taken a mortgage on, and each dawn jogged three miles through the mist-shrouded trees in City Park. In fact, listening to Clete’s advice and forgetting Ida was easier than I thought. I even wondered if my ability to give up an obsession was less a virtue than a sign of either age or a newly acquired callousness.
But airliners crash because a twenty-cent lightbulb burns out on the instrument panel; a Civil War campaign is lost because a Confederate courier wraps three cigars in a secret communiqué; and a morally demented man takes a job in a Texas book depository and changes world history.
It was early the next Monday, the rain hitting hard on the tin roof of my house, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in one hand. Between the trees on the back slope of my property, I could see the rain dancing on the bayou, the mist blowing into the cattails. “Hello?” I said.
“Hey, Robicheaux. What do you say we buy you breakfast?” the voice said.
“Who’s this?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“J. W. Shockly. Talked to you outside Baptist Hospital last week? Billy Joe and I have to do a favor for the boss. I’d really appreciate your help on this.”
“I’m pretty jammed up, partner.”
“It’ll take ten minutes. We’re at the public library, a half block down the street. What’s to lose?”
I put on a hat and raincoat and walked under the dripping limbs of the live oaks that formed a canopy over East Main. I passed the site of what had once been the residence of the writer and former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable and the grotto dedicated to Christ’s mother next to the city library. J. W. Shockly and the other sheriff’s deputy from the hospital parking lot, both in civilian clothes, were standing under the shelter at the library entrance, smiles fixed on their faces inside the mist, like brothers-in-arms happy to see an old friend.
“Can we go somewhere?” Shockly said, extending his hand. “You remember Billy Joe Pitts.”
So I had to shake hands with his partner as well. When I did, he squeezed hard on the ends of my fingers.
“That’s quite a grip you’ve got,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “How about coffee and a beignet down at Victor’s?”
I shook my head.
“Here’s what it is,” Shockly said. “The sheriff sent me down here because me and you go back. See, the nurse who was in Troy’s hospital room with you is the sheriff’s cousin. She says Troy was telling you some bullcrap about a crime involving a prostitute. The sheriff thinks maybe you’re working for the defense. That maybe the restaurant owner’s family has hired you to prove Troy was a lowlife or procurer or something, that maybe he was propositioning the waitress and the restaurant owner went apeshit. You following me?”
“No, not at all,” I replied.
Shockly’s hair was buzz-cut, his pale blue suit spotted with rain. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mints. His gaze seemed to search the mist for the right words to use. “Nobody wants to see the restaurant owner ride the needle. But he’s not going to skate, either. So how about it?”
“How about what?” I said.
“You working for the defense or not?” Billy Joe, his friend, said. He was a shorter man than Shockly, but tougher in appearance, his eye sockets recessed, the skin of his face grainy, his teeth too large for his mouth.
“I already explained my purpose in visiting the hospital. I think we’re done here,” I said.
Billy Joe raised his hands and grinned. “Enough said, then.” He popped me on the arm, hard enough to sting through my raincoat.
When I got back home, I washed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and berries and milk and sat down to eat by the kitchen window. The air blowing through the screen was cool and smelled of flowers and wet trees and fish spawning in the bayou, and in a few minutes I had almost forgotten about Shockly and Pitts and their shabby attempt to convince me their visit to New Iberia was an innocuous one.
But just as I started to wash my dishes I heard footsteps on the gallery. I opened the front door and looked down at Billy Joe Pitts, who was squatted on his haunches, scraping the contents from a pet food can onto a sheet of newspaper for my cat, Snuggs. J. W. Shockly waited at the curb in a black SUV, the exhaust pipe smoking in the rain. “What do you think you’re doing?” I said.
“Had this can in the vehicle and saw your cat. Thought I’d treat him to a meal,” Pitts said, twisting around, his bottom teeth exposed with his grin.
Snuggs had just started to eat, but I scooped him up and cradled him in one arm. He was a white, short-haired, unneutered male, thick-necked, heavy, ropy with muscle, his ears chewed, his head notched with pink scars. He was the best cat I ever owned. “Snuggs says thanks but he’s on a diet. And I say adiós, bud.”
I kicked the pet food and newspaper into the flower bed.
“Just trying to do a good deed. But to each his own,” Billy Joe Pitts said, getting to his feet, his face close to mine now, his skin as damp-smelling as mold.
CHAPTER
4
IT WAS STILL RAINING that afternoon when I drove across the train tracks and parked my pickup behind the courthouse, a short distance from the crumbling whitewashed crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. Helen Soileau, my old colleague, had become the parish’s first female sheriff. She was either bisexual or a lesbian, I was never sure which, and had the perfect physique for a man. I mention her sexuality not to define her but only to indicate that her life as a law officer was not always an easy one. She started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and became a patrolwoman in Gird Town and the neighborhood surrounding the Desire Project. The notoriety of the latter has no equal in the United States, except perhaps for Cabrini Green in Chicago and neighborhoods in the South Bronx. A white female cop who can enter the Desire at night, by herself, is an extraordinary person. Helen Soileau earned respect from people who do not grant it easily.
After I told her the story about Troy Bordelon’s death and the visit to my house by J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts, she leaned back in her swivel chair and looked at me for a long time. She wore blue slacks and a starched white shirt, with a gold badge hung on the pocket. Her hair was blond and natural but for some reason it had always looked like a wig when she wore it long. So now she had it cut short and tapered on the sides and back, and it gave her an attractive appearance that for the first time in her life caused men to turn and look at her. “You’re asking for your job back? Over these two characters coming to your house?” she said.
“The income wouldn’t hurt,” I said.
Helen’s eyes had a way of becoming lidless when she asked questions of people. “Did you ever consider that maybe these two deputies were telling the truth? That they think you’re doing P.I. work for the defense in a homicide? That they’re just i
nept and not very bright?”
“How many redneck cops stop by your house to feed your cat?”
She pulled at an earlobe. “Yeah, that is a little weird,” she said. “But the real reason you want your shield back is to start looking into this disappearance in Galveston, right?”
“Maybe.”
She tapped the arms of her chair with her palms and made clucking sounds with her tongue. “Love you, Streak, but the answer is no.”
I cleared my throat and looked out the window. Across the street I could see the mist blowing off the crypts in the cemetery, and the dull red texture of the bricks through the cracked places in the plaster. Someone was honking a horn angrily at the intersection, like an idiot railing at a television set. “Mind giving me an explanation?” I said.
She leaned forward in her chair. “Yeah, I do mind, and that’s because I’m your friend,” she said.
I didn’t try to sort out the meaning in her words. “Run those two cops for me.”
“Why?”
“They’re dirty.”
She clicked her teeth together. “I forgot what it was like when you were around,” she said.
“Would you clarify that?”
“Not in your dreams,” she replied.
THE CHURCH WHERE I attended Mass was on the outskirts of Jeanerette, down the bayou, in St. Mary Parish. Most of the parishioners were people of color and desperately poor. But it was a fine church to attend, built on a green bend of the bayou by an oak-shaded graveyard, and the people in the church had a simplicity and dignity about them that belied the hardship and struggle that characterized their lives.
That evening I drove down the bayou to attend a meeting of our church-annex committee. The back road to Jeanerette is like a geographical odyssey through Louisiana’s history and the disparities that make it less than real and difficult to categorize. The pastureland is emerald green in spring and summer, dotted with cattle and clumps of oak and gum trees, the early sugar cane waving in the richest alluvial soil in America. At sunset, Bayou Teche is high and dark from the spring rains; the air smells of gardenia and magnolia; and antebellum homes glow among the trees with a soft electrical whiteness that makes one wonder if perhaps the Confederacy should not have won the War Between the States after all.