James Burke - The New Iberia Blues

By Monday the victim had been identified through his prints as Joe Molinari, born on the margins of American society at Charity Hospital in Lafayette, the kind of innocent and faceless man who travels almost invisibly from birth to the grave with no paper trail except a few W-2 tax forms and an arrest for a thirty-dollar bad check. Let me take that one step further. Joe Molinari’s role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord in the manor and the serf in the field.

He’d lived in New Iberia all his life, smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and worked for a company that did asbestos teardowns and other jobs people do for minimum wage while they pretend they’re not destroying their organs. He’d had no immediate family, played dominoes in a game parlor by the bayou, and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never traveled farther than three parishes from his birthplace. He had gone missing seven days ago. Cormac Watts concluded Molinari had died from either blunt trauma or a load of opioids or both. The decomposition was too advanced to say.

The only asterisk to Molinari’s name was that he had been a janitor at the Iberia Parish courthouse for two years in the 1990s. Otherwise, he could have lived and died without anyone’s noticing.

Walking home after work, I saw Alafair and the screenwriter-producer Lou Wexler backing out of my driveway in his Lamborghini, the top down. Wexler braked and raised one hand high in the air. “Join us, sir.”

“For what?” I said.

“Dinner at the Yellow Bowl in Jeanerette,” he said.

“I left you a note,” Alafair said.

“Another time,” I said. “I may have to go back to the office tonight.”

“Roger that,” he said. He gave me a thumbs-up and drove away, his exhaust pipes throbbing on the asphalt. I saw Alafair try to turn around, her hair blowing. I didn’t have to go back to the office, and I felt guilty for having lied. I felt even worse for trying to make Alafair feel guilty.

I ate a cold supper on the back steps and watched the gloaming of the day, angry at myself for my inability to accept the times and the fact that Alafair had her own life to live and at some point I would have to let go of her and turn her over to the care of a man whom I might not like. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were sitting on our spool table, flipping their tails, checking out the breeze. The air was dense with the smell of the bayou, the way it smells after a heavy rain, and the light had become an inverted golden bowl in the sky, the cicadas droning in the trees. I heard someone walking through the leaves by the porte cochere.

“How’s it hanging, big mon?” Clete said.

There was no more welcome person in my life than Clete Purcel. He was the only violent, addicted, totally irresponsible human being I ever knew who carried his own brand of sunshine. “How you doin’, Cletus?”

“Is Alafair around?”

“She’s with some character named Lou Wexler.”

“I get the sense you don’t approve.”

“I don’t have a vote. What’s up?”

“I was researching these Hollywood guys. I don’t want to believe Tillinger is behind these killings.”

“These killings have nothing to do with you. Now give it a rest.”

“I should have called 911 when he bailed off that freight.”

“Enough.”

“All right,” he said. He sat down beside me and folded his hands. He looked at Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. “Something on your mind?”

“On my mind?”

“Yeah, something I can help with.”

How do you respond to a statement like that? “I spent the last two days talking to people who knew Joe Molinari.”

“The guy in the tree?”

“He probably weighed a hundred and twenty pounds and never hurt a soul in his life. Somebody drove a sharpened walking cane through his heart.”

“You’re getting the blue meanies.”

That was a term from the old days when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the French Quarter, and later, when we were partners in Homicide. “Blue meanies” was our term for depression, or living daily with human behavior at its worst. The blue meanies not only ate your lunch, they chewed you up and spat you out and ground you into the sidewalk.

“How do you read this stuff?” I said.

Clete thought for a moment. “The guy is posing his victims. He might be a photographer. He knows a lot about history and religion and symbolism. He’s full of rage, but he lets it out only in controlled situations. He’s the kind of white-collar schnook who lives alone and works eight to five in an office, then goes home and plays with a power saw in a basement that has blacked-out windows.”

Clete’s description made me shudder, not because of his detail but because he was seldom wrong when it came to a homicide investigation.

“That’s why Tillinger bothers me,” he said. “I found out he was in a drama club in high school. He was also an amateur photographer and dug David Koresh.”

“The cultist at Waco?” I said.

“Yeah. There’s one other factor. He messed around with acid in high school. In other words, he was into the same heavy-metal bands his daughter was. Later on he sees her as him, and burns down his house with her in it, and the mother for good measure.”

“You’re thinking too much,” I said.

“Travis Lebeau was in my office this afternoon. He says he saw Tillinger in Walmart.”

“Stop letting this guy jerk you around. And stop building a case against yourself.”

Clete rested his arm across my shoulders. It felt like a pressurized fire hose. “I worry about you. Guys like me can live alone. Guys like you shouldn’t. One day Alafair is going to leave for California or New York and not come back.”

“Say anything more and I’m going to hit you.”

“You got another problem,” he said. “You take the weight for others and won’t admit it. Just like me.”

“I mean it, Clete. Knock it off.”

“How’s your new partner working out?”

“Fine.”

“I saw her in front of city hall today,” he said.

I waited.

“She’s not your ordinary female plainclothes,” he said.

“And?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering how she’s working out.”

He made a study of Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon, his loafers tapping up and down on the step.

At 3:17 p.m. on Tuesday, Bailey Ribbons tapped lightly on my office door. She and Helen had spent most of the day at a seminar with an FBI agent in Lafayette.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said.

“Not at all.”

I got up and closed the door behind her.

“Desmond Cormier has called me twice,” she said. “The first time to invite me to dinner. The second time to apologize for the first time. There’s a message on my machine I haven’t listened to.”

She was standing less than two feet from me, her face lifted to mine, her hands on her purse.

“I’ll talk with him,” I said.

“He didn’t say anything rude.”

“He knows he’s compromising your situation.”

“You won’t be too hard on him, will you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You think his friend Butterworth is mixed up with Lucinda Arceneaux’s death?”

“There’s no evidence of that, except he denied seeing her body through the telescope. But he’s one of those guys.”

“Which guys?”

“There’s a malevolent joy in their eyes. They feed off Kryptonite. They love evil for its own sake.”

“That’s pretty strong.”

“If you underestimate a guy like that, you usually pay the price for the rest of your life.”