James Burke - The New Iberia Blues

“Why is it I believe nothing you say?” I asked.

“Because you’re an incompetent idiot with a crime on your hands that you don’t have the training or experience to deal with,” he replied. “Please excuse my candor, but I’m bloody tired of your arrogance and insults.”

The umbrella was flapping, the air bright with humidity, the deck blistering hot. He was either the best actor I had ever seen or a man who had a cache of dignity that I wouldn’t have thought him capable of.

“I’d like you to look at the body,” I said.

“You’re unrelenting, aren’t you,” he said.

“That’s fair to say.”

“Then get a warrant,” he said.

He stood up from the recliner. Our faces were six inches apart, a feral light in his eyes. I felt my right hand tighten and close and open again. My mouth was dry, a sound like wind blowing inside my head. I knew the signs all too well. It was the precursor that had come to me many times when I’d superimposed the face of a man named Mack on the faces of Asian men who had done me no harm. Bailey and Desmond were staring at us like witnesses to a car wreck in the making.

“Miss Bailey, please take a look at the photos of Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs,” Desmond said, pulling back the sliding door that opened onto the living room. “You, too, Dave. I do want y’all to see the film. It would mean a great deal to me.”

Bailey looked truly out of her element. My cell phone throbbed in my pocket. I looked at the caller’s number. It was Helen Soileau. “Dave here.”

“Are you at Cypremort Point?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You get anywhere?”

“Negative,” I said.

“Wind it up,” she said. “We’ve got another one.”

The duck camp was an old one, a desiccated shack abandoned in a swampy area southwest of Avery Island, the gum and cypress and persimmon trees strung with dead vines. We parked the cruiser and waded through a bog that was iridescent with oil and gasoline. The paramedics, three uniformed deputies, and Helen and Cormac Watts were already there. Helen and Cormac were wearing rubber boots and latex gloves. A swamp maple that was dying of saline intrusion, its limbs scaled with lichen, stood on the far side of the shack, a huge teardrop-shaped object suspended from one of the thickest limbs. The droning sound in the air was as loud as a beehive.

The 911 had been called in by a fisherman who had run out of gas and pulled up onto the hummock, dumbfounded and sickened by what he saw.

The wind changed, and a smell like a bucket full of dead rats washed over us. I heard Bailey gag. I cleared my throat and spat and handed her a clean handkerchief. “Put it over your nose.”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“That’s a smell no one gets used to. Just do it, Miss Bailey.”

“Don’t call me ‘miss’ anymore, Dave.”

“You got it.”

A deputy was stringing crime-scene tape through the trees. Helen was standing on a high place by the front of the shack. The shack had no door and no glass in the windows. The floor was caked with dirt and the shells of dead beetles. Helen was breathing through her mouth, her chest rising and falling slowly.

“Before we get to that mess in the tree, I want you to see this,” she said. “It may be the only forensics we take out of here.”

Heavy boot prints led into the shack and out through a hole broken in the boards on the far side, still jagged and unweathered, as though recently splintered. There were drag marks across the floor and stains that red ants were feeding on.

The stench was overwhelming now. I tried to envision the man who wore the boots. They were probably steel-toed, the strings laced through brass eyelets, the leather stiff, even gnarled, from wear in a swamp or on the floor of an offshore drilling rig. Or maybe they were the boots of a man with dark jowls and swirls of body hair who deliberately did not wash or shave and wore his odor like a weapon. I could almost hear his feet on the floor as he dragged his victim outside, the stride measured, his hand hooked in the victim’s shirt, his weight coming down with a sound like a wooden clock striking the hour.

Our departmental photographer was clicking away, a scarf wrapped across the bottom half of his face. Then he vomited inside the scarf.

We walked on dry ground to the other side of the shack. The body of a slight man dressed in khaki work clothes hung upside down inside a fish net. His arms were bound behind him. One ankle was roped to his wrists so the calf was pulled tight against the inside of the knee. His facial features were in an advanced state of decomposition and had the squinted look of a newly born infant. Flies crawled over almost every inch of his skin. A knotted walking stick with a sharpened tip had been shoved through the chest and out the back.

“You ever see him before?” Helen said.

“It’s hard to say,” I replied.

“Why is his leg tied like that?” she said.

The image was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. I shook my head.

“It’s from the tarot,” Bailey said.

“The fortune-telling deck?” Helen said.

“It’s a compilation of medieval and Egyptian iconography,” Bailey said. “The gypsies carried it through the ancient world into modern times.”

“So?” Helen said.

“The victim is positioned to look like the Hanged Man,” Bailey said.

“What’s the Hanged Man?” Helen said.

“Some say Judas, others say Peter,” Bailey said. “Others say Sebastian, the Roman soldier martyred for his faith. In death he makes the sign of the cross. In the deck he’s generally associated with self-sacrifice.”

Helen stepped away from the tree and stared at the ground, her hands on her hips. “What’s your opinion, Dave?” she asked. “You still don’t think Hugo Tillinger is our guy?”

“Maybe Tillinger killed his family or maybe he didn’t,” I said. “But I doubt he’s a student of Western symbolism.”

“Who the hell is?” Helen said. “I don’t think this is about tarot cards. I think this is about a guy who likes to kill people and wants to scare the shit out of the entire community.”

I looked at Bailey. She was obviously struggling to hide her discomfort about the odor of the victim; also, I suspected she was wondering if her education and knowledge were about to make her a lonely and isolated member of our department.

“Nobody saw anything except the fisherman who found the body?” I said to Helen.

“No,” she said. “This place will be washed away in another year or so. Cormac says the body has probably been here a week.”

We went back to the other side of the shack. The sun was shining through the trees, the leaves moving in the wind. I could hear a buoy clanging on the bay.

“Maybe the way the leg is tied is coincidence,” I said. “But the walking stick through the chest doubles the coincidence.”

“I don’t understand,” Helen said.

“Our own deck of playing cards comes from the tarot,” I said. “The suit of clubs come from the Suit of Wands. The Suit of Wands upside down is associated with failure and dependency.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Helen said.

“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.

“Both of you are sure about this?” she said.

“As sure as you can get when you put yourself inside the mind of a lunatic,” I replied.

One deputy lifted another deputy so he could cut the rope that bound the net to the tree limb. Neither of them could avoid touching the body nor escape its full odor. The body thudded on the ground in a rush of flies, the jaw springing open, a carrion beetle popping from the mouth.