James Burke - A Private Cathedral

“They don’t want to lose their meal ticket. Down the line, they’ll hire a third party to come after me.”

“What’s Li’l Face doing around here?”

“She lives with her aunt in the Loreauville quarters. Dave?”

I knew what was coming.

“The two guys I bounced around?” he said. “The word is they work for Mark Shondell. We need to chat him up.”

“Noooo,” I said, making the word as round as I could.

“You know the big problem you got here in New Iberia? Shintoism. You should get rid of all your churches and start building Japanese temples.”

“Leave Mr. Shondell alone.”

His face was serene, the part in his little-boy haircut as straight as a ruler. “ Mr. Shondell? Wow.”

I stared at the bayou, my hands hanging between my knees.

“I’m not letting you off the hook, Streak. What about the girl, what’s-her-name, Isolde Balangie?”

“What about her?” I said.

“Is she missing or not?”

“Not officially.”

“You checked with the locals?”

“I got my badge pulled. I’m not renewing old relationships these days.”

He wagged his finger in my face. “See? The Balangies and the Shondells are making a deal of some kind, and they’re using a teenage girl to do it. You’re going to leave her twisting in the wind?”

“That knife wound could have been in your neck.”

“Let me worry about that.”

I took a breath. “You have to promise me something: I talk, you listen.”

“I’m a fly on the wall. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He pressed one hand on my shoulder and stood up, his posture erect, his face lit by the sun. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“What is?” I said.

“The world. It’s beautiful. Sometimes you got to stop and take inventory and appreciate the good deal you’ve got.”

I had no idea what he meant. But that was Clete — a man with Janis Joplin and the full-tilt boogie in his head and a black-and-white photo in his wallet that most people would try to acid-rinse from their memory. “Coming?” he said.

Mark Shondell lived up the bayou among live oaks hung with Spanish moss in a glass-and-steel home of his own design, one that was as alien to our plantation culture as a spaceship. When he was much younger, he had been a co-producer of eighteen Hollywood B movies and had lost a fortune. When he left Los Angeles for the last time, he supposedly said, “One day I will destroy Hollywood. And the Jews who run it.”

He was an eccentric, a scholar, a technocrat, a graduate of the Sorbonne, and a recluse. Some said his ancestors were nobility from the Italian Piedmont and allies of the Borgias; others said the Shondells descended from Huguenots who delighted in smashing Catholic icons; at least one Shondell had been a member of the Vichy government after France’s surrender to Hitler.

Mark Shondell was forty and certainly handsome and distinguished in his bearing and carriage. Externally, he was kind and deferential and reticent, never given to offense. But he dined alone in our restaurants and did not entertain. His contributions to charity were given without ceremony. His gentility and the solipsistic distance in his eyes were such that people of humble origins were intimidated by him and often could not speak to him without a catch in the throat.

Unlike many in our state, he did not earn his wealth from the petroleum and chemical industry and the culture that produced Cancer Alley, a study in environmental degradation. The Shondells owned freighters and sailing yachts and plantations in Chile and Costa Rica and Colombia. Latin American dictators whose military uniforms tinkled with medals visited his home with regularity.

His genteel affectations and his cosmopolitan education aside, he had peculiarities that I didn’t understand. He wore multiple rings, as though some flaw in his lineage made him blind to ostentation. His eye wandered when a girl too young for him walked by. In a restaurant, he often bent to his food and scooped it into his mouth. Or he might use a toothpick while still at the table, shielding it with one hand, then leave it on the plate like a statement of contempt.

Clete and I turned in to his driveway and parked in front of the porch. His gardens were blazing with rosebushes and hibiscus and bougainvillea, the shady areas soft with blue and pink hydrangea, the base of the tree trunks ringed with four-o’clocks and caladiums. The steel and glass in his three-story home seemed to pull the sunlight out of the sky. I went to the porch and pushed the doorbell with my thumb. Shondell answered as though he’d expected us, although I had not called in advance.

“Come on in, Dave,” he said. “Your friend also. I have to be going shortly, but it’s always good to see you.”

“I’m Clete Purcel,” Clete said, stepping inside, his gaze sweeping the spacious rooms. “Dave and I both worked Homicide at NOPD.”

Shondell was dressed in a blue suit and a French-vanilla shirt with ruby cuff links. His face looked older than his years, but in a mature way, as though his wisdom were a gift and not an acquisition that takes a toll on the spirit. He waved at the white leather furniture in the living room. “Please sit down. Tell me what I can do for you.”

“We’re worried about a teenage girl named Isolde Balangie,” Clete said before I could reply. “Last time anybody saw her, she was watching your nephew Johnny on an amusement pier over in Texas.”

I wanted to kill him.

“I have no knowledge about that,” Shondell said.

“Then I had trouble with a couple of PIs who were bird-dogging her and Dave,” Clete said. “That’s how I got this hole in my arm.”

This was Clete’s idea of a fly-on-the-wall methodology.

Shondell was seated across from us. He folded his hands. “Dave, can you clarify this for me? I’m truly lost.”

“It’s as Clete says. I saw Isolde Balangie at the pier. She claimed your nephew was delivering her to you.” I had to cough when I finished the last sentence.

“There’s a misunderstanding here,” he said. “Tell you what. I was preparing a brunch for some friends. Let’s have a bite and talk this thing out. I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

“It certainly is. I’ll be right back.”

You didn’t argue with Mark Shondell. He gave an order or lifted a finger and robbed people of their words before they could speak. Are the very rich very different from you and me? What an absurdity. How about this as a better question: In what way are they similar to us?

Through the sliding glass doors, I could see a man weeding a flower bed on his knees, his back to us, a frayed wide-brim straw hat shading his features. I heard wheels squeaking on the carpet, then saw a white-jacketed black man pushing a serving cart out of the kitchen. It carried trays of bacon and ham and scrambled eggs and a pitcher of orange juice and one of tomato juice; it also carried bottles of rum, brandy, and vodka, clinking with the motion of the cart.

I saw the cautionary look on Clete’s face. “Mr. Shondell, we’re taking up too much of your time. We just need to get that girl’s situation behind us. Do you know where she is?”

“No, I do not,” Shondell replied. “Frankly, I don’t appreciate your tone or implication, either.”

“How about your nephew, the rock-and-roll singer?” Clete said. “Is he here’bouts?”

“No, he is not.”

“I heard he lived with you?” Clete said.

“He does. I raised him.” Shondell’s gaze went away from us, then came back, as though he had gotten control of his emotions and refocused his thoughts. His profile was as sharp as tin. He poured orange juice into two glasses, then added brandy in both and handed me one, his chest rising and falling. “Please help yourself, Mr. Purcel. Cheers, Dave. You were always a good fellow. You whipped the best of the best in the Golden Gloves.”