A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“No, the guys who ran those places. I’d like to get my hands on some guys like that. Maybe some of those neo-Nazis marching around with the Confederate flag.”

I don’t think Clete was talking just about Nazis. He hated evil and waged war against it everywhere he found it. I sometimes wondered if he was an archangel in disguise, one with strings of dirty smoke rising from his wings, a full-fledged participant in fighting the good fight of Saint Paul. Maybe that was a foolish way to think, but I never knew anyone else like him. Trying to explain his origins was a waste of time. The way I saw it, if Clete Purcel didn’t have biblical dimensions, who did?

His left arm was in a sling; his right hand was curved around a sixteen-ounce Styrofoam cup of coffee. The trees were dripping, the bayou swollen and yellow and carpeted with rain rings.

“Those two guys didn’t dime you?” I said.

“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.”