Chapter Forty
WE FOUND DESMOND Cormier in the late afternoon on the piece of hardscrabble land where his grandparents had run a general store; now the land was pocked with sinkholes and overgrown with persimmon trees and palmettos and swamp maples cobwebbed with air vines and storm trash blown out of the Atchafalaya Basin. Desmond was standing by a Humvee, staring at the shadows near an inlet that had turned red in the sunset. Behind us, I could see the glow of the casino in the distance.
I think the images he saw were not the ones I described. I believed he was looking into the past at the skinny twelve-year-old boy who roped cinder blocks to each end of a broomstick under a white sun and began creating a body that would put the fear of God into the bullies who tormented him on the school bus. I suspect he wondered about the fate of the bullies who taunted him and shoved him onto the gravel. Some were probably dead, some stacking time in Angola, some cleaning floors with mops and pails. If he ran into them, they probably would not connect him with the boy they had mocked. One thing I was sure of: If Desmond did meet them, he would treat them with kindness.
That’s why he angered me. He had the capacity to do enormous good in the world. But he handed out his gifts one coin at a time, and never with anonymity, unless you counted his payment for Lucinda Arceneaux’s crypt.
His talent had received global recognition, but his faith in his creativity was not enough to make him forswear the illegal money that powered his artistic enterprises. And enterprises they were. Without the sweaty multitudes and the satisfaction they demanded for the price of a theater ticket, Desmond probably would have been running an independent company filming lizards in the Texas Panhandle.
I parked on the faint outline of the dirt track that traversed the property, and asked Clete to stay in the truck.
“You got it,” he replied, and tilted his porkpie hat down on his eyes.
I walked up behind Desmond. He showed no awareness of my presence, even though I knew he heard me.
“What’s the haps?” I said.
He grinned in the same way he could light up a room when he was a kid. “How’s it going, Dave?”
“Hard to say, things have been moving so fast. It looks like Antoine Butterworth killed Smiley Wimple, then popped himself.”
“Whoa.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“What was that about Antoine popping himself?”
“He called me from your house, then parked one under his chin. That’s what it looks like.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“If it’s any consolation, he praised your name before he pulled the plug.”
Desmond was facing me now, his sleeves rolled, his forearms pumped and vascular. “Don’t be cynical, Dave. Antoine is my friend.”
“Your ‘friend’ may have arbitrarily murdered Smiley Wimple.”
“What do you mean, ‘arbitrarily’?”
“That’s what the only witness says. Wimple’s gun misfired, and Butterworth didn’t have to kill him, although a prosecutor would never be able to prove that.”
Desmond rubbed at his nose. “You’re not jerking me around? Antoine’s dead?”
“Unless he’s been resurrected.”
“Where is he?”
“Probably on a slab.”
“You’re a callous man.”
“He told me someday I would be able to read between the lines. Have any idea what he meant?”
“No.”
“Where does your money come from?” I asked.
“Half a dozen sources, all of them legitimate.”