The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

I was on my cell phone in the backyard. I saw a gator slip under the hyacinths, its serrated tail slicing through the flowers and tendrils.

“I love you, Dave.”

“You, too, kid,” I replied.

“I have to go now. I’ll call in the morning.”

I said goodbye and closed my cell. I heard a sound in the oak limbs above me and felt a shower of leaves come down on my head, and I thought perhaps Mon Tee Coon had returned. A hoot owl with an injured wing was caught in the branches. I got a ladder from my toolshed and climbed into the tree and brought him down and placed him in a cardboard box and called a friend in Loreauville who ran an animal sanctuary and would pick up the bird. Then I drove to the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, from which I had graduated in 1960 with a teacher’s certificate and a degree in English.

Chapter Eleven

I PARKED MY PICKUP under the oaks by Burke-Hawthorne Hall and walked to the library. The advantage of having a little knowledge about the classical world is that few other people do. The second advantage is your awareness that every problem facing us today has already occurred many times previously, and the behavior of the players is always predictable and the consequences are always the same. It’s a bit like going to the track with the names of the winners and losers in your pocket.

Every literary plot is either in the Bible, Greek mythology, or Elizabethan theater. Hemingway said it was all right for an author to steal as long as he improved the material. I felt the same way about a homicide investigation. The externals were cosmetic. The motivations were not a mystery. Avarice, fear, sexual passion, revenge, a desire for power, rage that produced a chemical assault on the brain, this was the detritus floating in the gene pool. Read Charles Dickens’s journalistic account of a public execution in London. It will make you want to flee humanity.

I put my notebook and a yellow legal pad on a big table in the archive reading room and tried to give a degree of coherence to the events that had occurred since I first saw the body of Lucinda Arceneaux bobbing in Weeks Bay. The apparent ritualistic hanging of Joe Molinari’s fly-infested corpse in a shrimp net, a walking cane plunged through his chest, made no sense unless you linked his death to Arceneaux’s. In the meantime, Hugo Tillinger had become a serious presence in our midst. He now had weapons and money courtesy of Axel Devereaux, and a cause to go with them, one involving prostitution.

Hilary Bienville had tied a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle with a piece of red twine, then claimed—facetiously, I’m sure—that she had gotten it from a bubblegum machine. When I’d pressed her about it, she had said, “Mine to know,” in a prideful fashion. In the library I found seven books that dealt specifically with Crusader knights. The Maltese cross was supposedly the sign of a late-sixteenth-century group, although it may have had earlier origins. No matter. It symbolized the ethos of the knight errant who, with body armor and chainmail and spiked mace and broadsword, managed to synthesize the noblest aspects of Christianity with bloodlust.

I stayed in the library until closing time, my eyes burning. At a certain time in your life, you accept the fact that lunacy comes in many forms. Is there a more disturbing sound than hobnailed boots striking a cobblestoned street in unison? Or our penchant for using ritual and procedure to give plausibility to the unthinkable? Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps. If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.

I thanked the reference librarian for her help and walked back to my pickup. The campus was dark, the sky sprinkled with stars. When I reached my truck, I saw that a sheet of spiral notebook paper had been placed under my windshield wiper. The message was printed in ballpoint, each letter a composite of slashes:

Dear Detective Roboshow,

Enjoyed talking to you on the phone. Hope you read the Bible. The following from Psalms is one of my favorite quotes. “Arise, O Jehovah; Save me, O my God: For thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; Thou hast broken the teeth of the wicked.”

Your friend?

H.T.

I folded the note and placed it in my shirt pocket. I had a feeling Tillinger was watching me, but I gave him no indication. The moon was up, the shadows of flooded trees moving on the water of Cypress Lake by the old student center. I slipped my snub-nose .38 special from my snap-on belt holster and held it behind my hip. I walked down to the edge of the water. “You out there, Hugo?”

There was no response.

“You shouldn’t be bird-dogging me, partner,” I said.

I heard a splash. It could have been either a frog or someone throwing a dirt clod into the lake.

“Maybe we’ve got the same goal,” I said. “Nobody is worried about you creeping Axel Devereaux’s house. The firearms are another matter. Maybe you’ll beat death row in Texas. Don’t blow it by getting into an assault beef in Louisiana.”

I thought I saw a silhouette merge with the corner of the student center, but I couldn’t be sure. No sound came from the lakeside or the walkways. I got into my truck and started the engine. Then the words from the Book of Psalms came back to me, and I squeezed my eyes shut at their implication.

• • •

I WENT INTO HELEN’S office early the next morning.

“The note is from Hugo Tillinger?” she said.

“Who else?”

“Look, I’m not exactly a biblical scholar. Run that quotation by me again.”

“It refers to Jehovah breaking the teeth of the wicked.”

Her eyes were fastened on mine. “Travis Lebeau,” she said. “His teeth were pulled out.”

“Yep.”