A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“That’s probably where I’ll end up anyway. Next time down, I’m looking at ‘the bitch.’?”

“Habitual offender?”

“I’ve been working on it since I was seventeen. That’s the year I got turned out.”

“You were raped?”

“For starters. Look at it this way. Adonis Balangie isn’t his father or grandfather. Mr. Mark is trying to work a truce. So maybe he looks at me as some kind of window into the Balangie family. What’s the harm in that? Bottom line, I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Can I ask you another question?”

He touched at his nose and sniffed. “If I don’t got to answer it.”

“We’re sitting in front of a fan, but you’ve got a tic in your eye, and there’s perspiration on your upper lip.”

“Something happened at Mr. Mark’s place I cain’t put together.” He looked again at the bar. “Somebody ought to shut up them women.”

“Tell me what happened, Marcel.”

“A tree limb went down on the power line a few nights ago. I went into the main house to he’p Mr. Mark light some candles. While we were walking around in the dark, he says to me, ‘Bet you never thought you’d meet Pluto before your time.’?”

He waited for me to respond. I kept my eyes on his and didn’t speak. He cleared his throat. “I axed him if he was talking about Mickey Mouse’s dog. He laughed his head off. Not in a nice way. I felt stupid and didn’t know what to say.”

“Yeah, that’s a bit strange,” I said.

“I looked up who Pluto was. The Roman god of the underworld.”

“Maybe Shondell was just making a joke.”

“That ain’t all that happened. Mr. Mark’s candles melted down. I went to the Walmart and bought some more. When I got back to the house, it was still raining and lightning. He didn’t answer the door, even when I banged. I went around the side and looked through the French doors. The power was still out, and the inside of the house was black. He was sitting at his desk in front of his computer. There wasn’t no battery power, no generator backup, nothing like that anywhere near his desk.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Lights were flashing in his face. But there wasn’t any source. Just big blades of yellow light all over his face.” He squeezed at his stomach, then drank from the bottle. “I think I got an ulcer. Jesus Christ, Dave, don’t just sit there. How do you explain that?”

“It was probably a flash of lightning reflecting off a surface on Shondell’s desk.”

He jabbed his finger in the air, shaking it for emphasis. “That’s right! That’s probably what it was! You got it, man!” He hit me in the chest. “You’re a smart man, you.”

But his description of Shondell’s face during the storm made me think of a figure in the works of Dante and Milton. His name meant “the light bringer.” The name was Lucifer.

Chapter Nine

I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED that normalcy is highly overrated and not to be confused with virtue. With that in mind, I can say in a charitable way that Father Julian Hebert (pronounced a-bear) was the most eccentric Catholic priest I’ve ever known. He went by his first name and never wore a Roman collar or a black suit, and he encouraged people to call him by his first name and not his title, which was hard for most Cajuns to do. He was socially tone-deaf and often a disaster at public gatherings. Last and most important, he had no filter between his brain and his vocal cords.

His mother was Irish and his father hard-core coon-ass. Clete Purcel called him “Goody Two-shoes Meets Chuck Norris.” With his incongruous athletic physique and short blond hair and egg-shaped face and baby-blue eyes and complexion that resembled the skin of a pinkish-white balloon, he floated around the community and anchored himself in various venues where, without speaking a word, he made everyone either uncomfortable, puzzled, afraid, or willing to throttle him. These venues included dog- and cockfights, drive-through daiquiri windows, cage fights, strip bars, porn theaters, and casinos that gave free drinks around the clock to pensioners and functionally illiterate people who often lost everything they owned.

On a national Sunday-morning television show, when the other guests were discussing homosexual, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and restroom issues as though there were no other terms for human beings and no other noteworthy subjects on earth, Julian said, “How about we just drop it? Who cares how people use their equipment? In your world, I’d probably have to introduce myself as a premature ejaculator. At least if I had a love life. Anyway, give it an effing break, will you?”

Whenever the bishop sent him a letter of reprimand or correction, Father Julian would report back that he had taken care of the problem. He always told the truth. He took care of the problem by dropping the letter in the wastebasket, not even bothering to wad it up.

He went bowling by himself at three A.M. in an all-night bowling alley in Lafayette and line-danced at a nightclub. He gave most of his money away and was arrested twice at Fort Benning in the protest against the School of the Americas. His tiny church down the bayou was the poorest in the diocese, and his parishioners were mostly people of color. The only toilet in the building was always stopping up with either roots or mud that seeped into the drainpipe whenever it rained. But Julian never lost faith and was beloved by his parishioners. His greatest oddity was his similarity to Clete Purcel. He recognized virtue in others but did not see it in himself.

The morning after I spoke to Marcel LaForchette, I drove to Jeanerette and parked by Father Julian’s cottage and knocked on the door. The sky was blue, a crusty sliver of moon still visible above the trees, the sugarcane bending in the fields. Down by the bayou was a cemetery with crypts that were green with lichen and scattered down the slope like huge decayed teeth. I wanted to wander by the water and let go of all my troubles and try to remember the admonition that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. I wanted to throw bread crumbs on the edge of the lily pads and watch the bream and sunfish rise to the surface like wobbling green and gold air sacs of sunshine. I wanted these simple pleasures and a world free of death, a place where evil men do not break in and steal. Maybe that was the world Father Julian sought, too, I thought. Maybe that’s why I was a cop. If so, both of us were probably headed for a huge disappointment.

You might wonder why I sought out the counsel of an iconoclast like Julian Hebert. There were several reasons. He was originally from New Iberia and knew Marcel LaForchette, but he had also known the Balangie family in New Orleans and supposedly attended Pietro Balangie on his deathbed. In fact, there was a legend about it. Julian congratulated the old man for owning up to his sins, then said, “There’s one other thing we should think about, Pietro. Maybe you can reach out to a few of your enemies and ask their forgiveness.”

“I can’t do that, Father,” Pietro said.