James Burke - A Private Cathedral

The weeks passed without any contact from Marcel LaForchette. Then on a Sunday afternoon, when I was walking in City Park, I saw two men in a purple Oldsmobile pull onto the grass and park under the oaks and get out and remove a golf bag from the trunk. They were stout men in their prime, tanned perhaps as much by chemicals as sun, dressed in sport clothes, the kind of men who probably played college football one or two semesters and later sold debit insurance, ex-jocks you felt sorry for.

Until you looked at the scar tissue in the hairline, or the big hands with too many rings on them, or the white teeth that were too wet, the smile like that of a hungry man staring at a roast.

They teed up on the grass and whocked two balls down the bayou, watching them arch and splash in the distance.

“Excuse me,” I said behind them.

They turned around, resting their clubs, their faces full of sunshine.

“This isn’t a driving range,” I said.

“Didn’t think anyone would mind,” the shorter man said. He had thick lips and hair that was long and hung in ringlets and was as bright as gold, like a professional wrestler’s, his biceps as solid as croquet balls. “Did you think anyone would mind, Timmy?”

“Not unless we hit a fish in the head,” Timmy said.

“A lot of people seem to think Louisiana is a garbage dump,” I said. “We’ve got trash all over the state.”

“Yeah,” the shorter man said. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

“He’s talking about us,” Timmy said. “Right? You’re saying we’re trash?” His brown hair was soft-looking and dry and cut in a 1950s flattop and looked like an upturned shoe brush. His smile never left his face.

“I’m a police officer,” I said. “I’d appreciate y’all not using the bayou as a golf course. That’s all.”

“We’re not troublemakers,” Timmy said. “The opposite. We’re problem solvers.”

The man with gold hair that hung in ringlets licked his lip. “That’s right. We wouldn’t jump you over the hurdles, sir.”

“I look like an old man?” I said.

“A show of respect,” he said.

“You guys like zoos?” I said.

“Yeah,” Timmy said. “You got one here?”

“No, but there’s a nice one in Houston,” I said. “In Hermann Park, off South Main.”

“Without much work, this town could be a zoo,” the shorter man said. “Circle it with some chicken wire, then charge people admission.”

“Yeah, our man here could probably run it,” Timmy said. “What do you say about that, slick?”

The oak tree above us swelled with wind. A white speedboat sliced down the middle of the bayou, its wake washing organic detritus over the cypress knees and bamboo roots that grew like half-buried knuckles along the mudflats. “I think you boys passed me on the highway when I was driving up to Huntsville,” I said. “Tarantulas were crossing the road, hundreds of them. It’s quite a phenomenon to witness.”

The speedboat engine whined in the distance like a Skilsaw cutting through a nail.

“We passed you?” Timmy said. “I think you got us mixed up with somebody else.”

“I’m not real popular these days,” I said. “Why do you want to bird-dog a guy like me?”

“Because Marcel LaForchette is a button man for the Jersey Mob,” said the man with the gold hair. “Because he made the street four days ago. Because you had something to do with getting him out.”

“I don’t have that kind of juice,” I said.

“Call me Ray,” the man with gold hair said. He twisted one of his ringlets around his finger. His eyes were out of alignment, one deeper and higher than the other. “We’re private investigators. LaForchette is an animal. Our client is a man who has reason to worry about a guy who worked with Jimmy the Gent. You know who that is, right?”

“Yeah, Jimmy Burke,” I said. “He’s doing life in New York.”

“He was doing life,” Timmy said. “Now he’s sleeping with the worms. But LaForchette is still around. So why don’t you tell us what you had to say to him in Huntsville?”

“You didn’t start your surveillance of me at Hermann Park Zoo,” I said. “You were at the amusement pier the night before.”

“You think you saw us on an amusement pier?” Ray said.

“Maybe you were looking at me through binoculars. But you saw me talking to Isolde Balangie. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

Ray brushed at his nose and huffed through one nostril. “Sometimes it’s not smart to show you’re smart.”

“I never claimed to be smart,” I said.

“You lose your badge for drinking or being on a pad?” Ray said.

“Call it a sabbatical,” I said.

“So you won’t mind?” he said.

“Mind what?”

“This.” He slid a driver from the golf bag and dropped three balls on the grass. He whocked the balls one after another, then watched the last one splash in the bayou and offered me the club. “I got some more balls in the car. Smack a few. We don’t mean to offend. A young girl is missing. If she isn’t found, some people are gonna be swinging by their colons.”

The only sound was the wind in the trees. Timmy’s eyes lit up as they settled on mine. He nodded as though confirming his friend’s statement, one finger bouncing in the air. “I’ve seen it. Meat hooks. Fucking A, man.”

“Y’all know where I live?” I said.

“Right across the bayou,” Ray said. “A shotgun house. You got four-o’clocks and caladiums around the trees in your yard.”

“Don’t come around,” I said.

“Hold still,” Timmy said. He popped a leaf off my hair with his fingers. “I hear you got a daughter. One in college. I got one, too.”

I stepped back from him. I could feel my hands opening and closing at my sides. “I’m going to walk away now.”

“He’s walking away,” Timmy said.

“Yeah, that’s the way they do it here,” Ray said. “They walk away. They don’t want trouble in Dog Fuck. So they walk away.”

I cut through the shadows of the trees, light-headed, my ears ringing, and walked down the single-lane road that wound through the park. I heard their engine start behind me, then the Oldsmobile inching by, the gravel in the tire treads clicking on the asphalt. Ray was humped behind the wheel, his hands tapping a beat to the music on the radio, and Timmy was in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette with lavender paper and a gold filter tip, blowing smoke rings like a man at peace with the world.

The Oldsmobile passed a group of black children kicking a big blue rubber ball on the grass. Autumn was just around the corner. The strips of orange fire in the clouds and the shadows in the live oaks and the coolness of the wind and the tannic odor of blackened leaves comprised a perfect ending to the day or, better yet, a perfect entryway into Indian summer and a stay against the coming of winter.

But if the evening was so grand and the riparian scene so tranquil, and the presence of the children such an obvious testimony to the goodness and innocence of man, and if I were indeed above the taunts of misanthropes, why was my thirst as big as the Sahara and my heart wrapped with thorns?

The next day at a New Orleans saloon on Magazine, I gave Clete Purcel a short version of the events on the pier and at the prison and on Bayou Teche. Magazine was where Clete had grown up. The saloon had a stamped-tin ceiling and a grainy wood floor and a long bar with a brass rail, and the owner kept the beer mugs refrigerated so they were sheathed with ice when he filled them, and for all those reasons Clete used the saloon as his office away from his office.

He listened while I spoke, his quiet green eyes staring at nothing, then chalked his cue and split a nine-ball rack and gazed at a solitary ball dropping into a pocket. It was dark and raining outside, and the shadows of the rain running down the window made his face look like he was crying.