James Burke - The New Iberia Blues

I rubbed the humidity out of my eyes and looked again. The tide had reversed itself and was coming toward the shore. I was sure I saw a huge wooden cross bobbing in the chop. Someone was fastened to it, the arms extended on the horizontal beam, the knees and ankles twisted sideways on the base. The cross lifted on the swell, the headpiece rising clear of a wave. The air went out of my lungs. I saw the person on the cross. She was black and wearing a purple dress. It was wrapped as tightly as wet Kleenex on her body. Her face was wizened, from either the sun or the water or her ordeal. Her head lolled on her shoulder; her hair hung on her cheeks and curled in tendrils around her throat. She seemed to look directly at me.

“What’s wrong, Dave?” Desmond said.

“There’s a woman out there. On a cross.”

“What?” he said.

“You heard me.”

He bent to the telescope, then moved it back and forth. “Where?”

“At three o’clock.”

“I don’t see anything. Wait a minute, I see a shark fin. No, three of them.”

I pushed him aside and looked again. A long wave was sliding toward the shore, loaded with sand and organic trash from a storm, its crest breaking, gulls dipping into it.

“You probably saw a reflection and some uprooted trees inside it,” Desmond said. “Light and shadow can play tricks on you.”

“She was looking right at me,” I said. “She had thick black hair. It was curled around her neck.”

I felt Antoine Butterworth breathing on me. I turned, trying to hide my revulsion.

“Let me see,” he said.

I stepped aside. He bent to the telescope, holding his wadded towel to his genitals. “Looks like she floated away.”

I looked once more. The sun was as bright as brass on the water. I could feel Butterworth breathing on me again. “Would you step back, please?” I said.

“Pardon?”

“I’m claustrophobic,” I said. “Been that way since I was a child.”

“Perfectly understandable,” he said. He put on a blue silk robe and tied it with a sash. “Better now?”

“We’ll be running along,” I said to Desmond. “We’ll call the Coast Guard.”

Sean looked through the telescope, then stood.

“Let’s go, Deputy,” I said.

“Hold on,” he said. He wiped the eyepiece with a handkerchief and looked again. Then he turned and fixed his eyes on mine.

“What?” I said.

“Son of a bitch is hung on a snag,” he said. “Those aren’t sharks out there, either. They’re dolphins.”

I stared at Desmond and Butterworth. Desmond’s face blanched. Butterworth was grinning, above the fray, enjoying the moment.

“I’ve got a boat,” Desmond said, collecting himself. “There’s really a body there? I didn’t see it, Dave.”

“My, my, isn’t this turning into a lovefest?” Butterworth said.

I punched in Helen Soileau’s number on my cell. “Y’all stick around. My boss lady might have a question or two for you.”

We reached the body and the cross with a department rescue boat at 10:34 p.m. In the glare of searchlights, two divers jumped off the bow, freed the cross from a submerged tree, and glided it onto a sandspit, the waves rippling over the dead woman’s face. She was tied to the beams with clothesline. Her eyes were open; they were the same pale blue as Desmond’s.

Our sheriff was Helen Soileau. She had worked her way up from meter maid to detective grade at NOPD and later became my homicide partner at the New Iberia Police Department. After the city department merged with the parish, she was elected our first female sheriff.

Helen and a paramedic and Sean and I waded through the shallows onto the sand. Helen shone her flashlight on the body. “Jesus.”

I’d been wrong in my earlier description. The dead woman was not just fastened to the cross with clothesline. Her ankles were nailed sideways to the wood, which twisted her knees out of alignment with her hips. Helen stooped down and straightened the dead woman’s dress and untied her wrists. A paramedic unzipped a body bag. I squatted down beside the cross. “How long do you think she was in the water?”

Helen held her flashlight beam on the dead woman’s face. “She wasn’t submerged. Hard to say. Maybe eight or nine hours.”

“That doesn’t compute with the 911 calls about a scream early this morning,” I said.

“Maybe this isn’t the same woman,” Helen said.

“We picked up a tennis shoe from the beach,” I said. “A size seven.”

“That’s about the right size,” she said. “No wounds I can see except on the ankles. No ligature marks or bruising on the neck. Who the hell would do this?”

We were both wearing latex gloves. I touched one of the nails that had been driven through the woman’s ankles. “Whoever did it knew something about Roman crucifixions. The nails went through the ankles rather than the tops of the feet. The bones in the feet would have torn loose from the nails.”

Helen looked down at the body, her face empty. “Poor girl. She can’t be more than twenty-five.”

I remained on my haunches and took the flashlight from Helen’s hand and shone it on the ankle wounds. They were clean, as though they had not bled. There was a cheap metal chain around one ankle. A tiny piece of silver wire barely clung to one of the links.

In South Louisiana, religion is a complex matter. Not all of it originated in Jerusalem or Rome. Some of it has origins in the Caribbean Islands or western Africa. For many poor whites and people of color, the gris-gris — bad fortune or an evil spell — can be avoided only by wearing a perforated dime on a string around a person’s ankle. I knew a white couple, Cajuns who couldn’t read or write, who tied a string around their infant child’s throat to prevent the croup from getting into her chest. The child strangled to death in her crib.

“See something?” Helen said.

I stood up, my knees popping. “If she was wearing a charm, it didn’t do her much good.”

“I don’t know about that,” Helen said.

A ball of yellow heat lightning rolled through a cluster of storm clouds and disappeared without making a sound. “I didn’t catch that.”

“There’s not a scratch on her,” Helen said. “You know what the crabs do to any kind of carcass?”

I looked across the bay at Cypremort Point. All the lights were on in Desmond’s house. I wondered if he or his friend was watching us through the telescope. I wondered if I had ever really known Desmond Cormier.

“Let’s get out of here,” Helen said. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

I was thrice a widower and lived with my adopted daughter, Alafair, in a shotgun house on East Main in New Iberia. When I got back from Weeks Bay, I went straight to bed and didn’t tell Alafair where I had been or what I had seen until the next morning. It was raining, and Bayou Teche was over the banks and running through the trees at the foot of our property, and there was sleet inside the rain that struck the tin roof as hard as birdshot. Alafair had spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and brought our warrior cat, Snuggs, and his friend Mon Tee Coon inside and begun feeding them. Her face showed no expression while I told her about the woman on the cross.

“No identification?” she said.

“A tiny chain around the ankle.”

“Nothing on the chain?”

“A piece of wire. Maybe a charm had been torn loose.”

Her eyes roamed over my face. “What did you leave out of the story?”

“I saw the cross and the woman through Desmond’s telescope. So did the deputy. But Desmond and this guy Butterworth said they couldn’t see anything.”

She put a plate of biscuits and two cups of coffee on the table, then sat down. “Would it make sense for them to lie about what you had already seen?”