James Burke - The New Iberia Blues

“About sixteen square miles of it a year,” I replied.

“Why are you bothered by the movie director and his friend?”

“It’s the friend, Butterworth, who bothers me more. I think he’s a deviant and a closet sadist.”

“Those aren’t terms you hear a lot anymore,” she said.

“He’s the real deal.”

“Introduce me.”

Her hair was feathering on her cheek. My protective feelings toward her were the same as those I had for my daughter, I told myself. It was only natural for an older man to feel protective of a younger woman. There was nothing wrong with it. Absolutely. Only a closet Jansenist would see design in an inclination that’s inherent in the species.

What a lie.

I had called Desmond and made an appointment. But that was not all I had done by way of preparation regarding Antoine Butterworth. I had talked with a friend who was captain of the West Hollywood Station of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Butterworth was almost mythic among the film industry’s subculture. He hired prostitutes he made degrade each other with sexual devices; he also hung them on hooks and beat them with his fists. He returned to Los Angeles from New Orleans in a rage and berated everyone in his office because he had to sleep with an ugly prostitute. He and a co-producer put LSD in the lunch of the co-producer’s Hispanic maid and videotaped her while she stumbled bewildered and frightened around the house; later, they showed the tape at their office. Butterworth lived in the Palisades in a $7 million white stucco home overlooking the ocean; he’d moved a junkie physician into the pool house so he could have a supply of clean dope. The physician had been found floating facedown among the hyacinths, dead from an overdose. Prior to his situation with Butterworth, the physician had been in a twelve-step program.

If Butterworth had a bottom, no one knew what it was.

Desmond opened the door. He took one look at Bailey Ribbons, and the breath left his chest. “Who are you?”

She blushed. “Detective Ribbons.”

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

“I hope we haven’t upset you,” she said.

“No, my heavens, come in,” he replied. He looked over his shoulder at the deck. “Can you give me a second?”

“Is there a problem?” I said.

“We were playing a couple of songs,” he said. “Antoine isn’t quite dressed. I got my times mixed up.”

He went into the bedroom and got a robe and took it out on the deck. Through the glass doors I saw him and Butterworth arguing. Butterworth was wearing a yellow bikini, his tanned body glistening with oil; he put on the robe and cinched it tightly into his hips, then picked up a roach clip from an ashtray and took a hit and ate the roach.

Desmond came back into the living room. “Do you know who you look like?” he asked Bailey.

“My parents, I suspect,” she replied.

“Cathy Downs. The actress who co-starred with Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine. ”

“I’m not familiar with that film,” she said.

“We’ll have a showing here. Whenever you like,” he said.

“Need to talk to your man out there, Desmond,” I said.

He scratched at his eyebrow. “That stuff again?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘that stuff,’ ” I said. “This is a homicide investigation.”

“Antoine had some addictions in the past. You should be able to understand that.”

“I just watched him eat a roach.”

“He has a prescription for medical marijuana. I won’t let him smoke it here again. You have my word.”

“Do you play all those instruments?” Bailey asked.

“The saxophone is Antoine’s,” Desmond replied.

“What songs were you playing?” she asked.

“Some of the Flip Phillips arrangements. You know who Flip Phillips was?”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said.

“This isn’t a social call,” I said.

“Okay,” he said to me. “What a hothead you are, Dave. No, I take that back. You’re a Puritan at heart. You need buckle shoes and one of those tall hats.”

I slid back the glass door and waited for Bailey. “Coming?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling.

Desmond’s eyes never left the back of her head.

Butterworth was lying on a recliner under a beach umbrella inset in a glass table. “Oh me, oh my, what do we have here?” he said.

His robe had fallen open. The outline of his phallus was stenciled as tautly as a banana against his bikini. He blew me a kiss.

Desmond was right. My feelings about Butterworth were not objective. An open cooler humped with crushed ice and imported bottles of beer rested on a redwood table. I pulled a bottle of Tuborg from the ice. “Catch.”

Butterworth blinked but caught it with his left hand as deftly as a frog tonguing an insect out of the air. “Flinging things around, are we?”

“Your eyesight seems pretty good,” I said. “Too bad it seems to fail you when you look through a telescope.”

“Aren’t we the clever one.”

“I recommend you not speak to me in the first-person plural again,” I said.

“Bad boy. That excites me,” he said.

“I don’t think you get it, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “Louisiana is America’s answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How’d you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?”

“Some big black husky fellows will be visiting me after lights-out?”

As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.

“Would you stand up a minute?” I said.

“Are we going to get rough now?” he said.

“No, your robe is open and I don’t like looking at you,” I said. “I also don’t like your general disrespect.”

He flipped his robe over his nether regions but didn’t move from the recliner. “I told Desmond we made a mistake coming here.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“We’re shooting a film in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. I told him we’d have trouble here.”

“You’re filming in Louisiana because the state will subsidize up to twenty-five percent of your costs,” I said. I removed an envelope from my pocket and handed it to him. “Take a look at this.”

Butterworth slipped a photo out of the envelope and studied it. His eyebrows were beaded with sweat. “This was taken in a morgue?”

“That’s right.”

“This is the woman who was on the cross?”

The photo showed the body of Lucinda Arceneaux on the autopsy tray, a sheet pulled to her chin. Butterworth replaced the photo in the envelope and returned it to me, his face solemn.

“Look again,” I said. “She worked for a catering service that supplies film companies on the set.”

“I don’t need to. I’ve never seen this person.”

“Look again, Mr. Butterworth.”

“I told you the truth. I think you gave me that envelope to get my fingerprints on it.”

I could smell the sweat and grease and weed on his skin. “You like to beat up hookers?”

“That’s a lie.”

“An administrator at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department told me you make them strap on dildos and degrade each other, and then you hang them up on hooks or straps and beat the hell out of them.”

“I’m done with this,” he said.

“Yeah, how about it, Dave?” Desmond said behind me.

“It takes a special kind of guy to use up the life of an innocent young woman in order to re-create the Crucifixion,” I said. “We never had anything like this around here. At least not till you brought Mr. Butterworth to town.”

“In Rwanda I saw bodies stacked as high as this house and set on fire,” Butterworth said. “Some of them were still alive. If you weren’t a police officer, I’d break your fucking jaw.”