The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

“Dave, I don’t have the legal power to arrest anyone. I can take skips into custody because they’re considered property, but that’s it. Helen is wrong on this.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“I’m sorry you got your ticket pulled, big mon.”

“Like you say, we’re getting too old for this crap.”

“Come in with me. We’ll put the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide back in business.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll sit around and suffer,” he said.

“Lay off it, Cletus. I don’t feel too well right now.”

“You really believe Tillinger would take out a guy with a mattock?” he asked.

“I think Tillinger and a few like him could found a new religion that would make radical Islam look like the teachings of Saint Francis.”

• • •

THE TAILINGS OF the monsoon season moved across the sun that evening, darkening and wetting the land and lighting the sky with electricity that quivered and disappeared between the buttes and the clouds. It was Desmond Cormier’s birthday. The party began on the terrace, under canopies hung with Japanese lanterns. As the storm dissipated, the celebrants moved down the slope into a picnic area that had a wood dance floor and kiva fireplaces. A band featuring conga drums and horns and a marimba and oversize mariachi guitars played inside a gazebo. Desmond was soused to the eyes and dancing by himself with a bottle of champagne, dressed in tight cutoffs and a T-shirt scissored across the midriff, the smooth firmness of his physique and his wide-set washed-out eyes and his tombstone teeth and the bulge in his shorts and the solipsistic glaze on his face a study in sensuality.

Clete and Alafair and I sat at a table by one of the clay fireplaces and rolled lettuce and tomato and shredded cheese and strips of steak inside tortillas and watched Desmond dance. The flames from the gas lamps painted his body with bands of yellow and orange like the reflections of an ancient fire on a cave wall. A tall, very thin woman with jet-black hair and milk-white skin and a dress slit to the top of the thigh tried to dance with him, her eyes fastened on his. But if she desired to make use of the moment and become a soul mate with Des, she had underestimated the challenge. He scooped her up, one arm under her rump, and waltzed in a circle, holding up the magnum bottle with his other hand, while everyone applauded and the thin woman tried to hide her surprise and embarrassment.

I felt a shadow fall across the side of my face. I turned and looked up at Antoine Butterworth.

“Good evening, all,” he said.

“Hello, Antoine,” Alafair said. She looked worriedly at me and then at Clete. “I thought you were holding down things in New Iberia.”

“I had enough of the mosquitoes and humidity for a while,” he said.

Alafair looked at me again, then back at Butterworth. “Would you like to join us?”

“I didn’t mean to crash in on you,” he said.

“Sit down,” I said to him.

“Change of attitude?” he said. “Saw a revelation in the sky, that kind of thing?”

“I’m suspended from the department,” I said. “You’re safe.”

He pulled up a chair and fingered his chin. The skin on his face and his shaved head looked as tight as latex on a mannequin. “Could I ask why?”

“The sheriff likes to flush out the place on occasion,” I said. “Kind of like a reverse affirmative-action program.”

“Nothing to do with us, the California infidels?” he said.

“No, it has everything to do with me,” Clete said. “I cut slack to an escaped convict. Dave didn’t report me, so he took my weight. Know who Hugo Tillinger is?”

“Saw his picture in the paper. Man who burned up his wife and daughter,” Butterworth said. “Charming fellow, I’m sure. You say you turned him loose?”

“That’s the kind of thing I do,” Clete said. He was on his fourth Heineken. “I screw up things. You ever do that? Screw up things?”

“We all have our special talents,” Butterworth said.

“See, what bugs me is Tillinger was buds with a former Aryan Brotherhood member named Travis Lebeau, a guy who got chain-dragged on Old Jeanerette Road,” Clete said. “See, the AB might have been mixed up with a bad sheriff’s deputy who was pimping off some local working girls that maybe some Hollywood guys would dig as a change of pace. Know what I’m saying?”