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.
“Why not?” Julian asked.
“I killed them all,” Pietro replied.
But I’d heard the same story told about Frank Costello, so maybe this was another urban legend lending a degree of humor to the evil that can dwell in the human heart. Regardless, my recount is probably an attempt to hide the real reason for my visit to Julian’s cottage. I was still bothered by Marcel LaForchette’s tale about the power outage at Mark Shondell’s house. I may have had other things on my mind as well, namely, the wife of Adonis Balangie.
Julian and I took a stroll by the graveyard. He was wearing Levi’s and sandals with white socks and a T-shirt that had been washed from purple to lavender, with Mike the Tiger’s head emblazoned on the front.
“Marcel saw lights flashing on Mark Shondell’s face?” he asked.
“That’s what he said.”
“Marcel is a superstitious man.”
“Why would Shondell make a joke about a pagan god? Marcel thought he was talking about Mickey Mouse’s dog.”
An alligator gar was rolling among the lily pads, its armored back slick and serpentine, sliding down into the root system where the bream hid. “Who knows why Mark Shondell does anything?” Julian said.
“You’re not a fan?”
His blue irises were the size of nickels. He picked up a pecan that was still in the husk and tossed it at the gar. “I think you should stay away from Shondell.”
“Do you know something about him that I don’t?”
“I also think you should get your badge back,” he replied.
“You can’t talk to me about him on a personal basis? He confided something to you in the confessional?”
“That’s a laugh.”
I had told him only part of the story about the Shondells and the Balangies, and I didn’t know if I should say more. Why burden a good man with a problem neither of us could solve? Anyway, he beat me to it. “What’s really on your mind, Dave?”
I told him about Isolde being used as a pawn by Adonis and Penelope Balangie.
“They gave away their daughter?” he said.
“That’s the way it looks.”
“Have you reported this?”
“There’s nothing to report. There’s no evidence of a crime.”
“Does Adonis Balangie know?”
“He’s behind it,” I said.
“What about Penelope?”
“I’m not sure. She’s hard to read.”
He was looking at the trees across the bayou. His eyes cut to mine. “In what way?”
“She came to see me in New Iberia. She said she wanted help.”
“You believed her?”
“I’m not sure.”
He stared at the water. The gar was gone. The wind was cold and damp and gusting on the bayou’s surface, shriveling it like old skin. “She’s a beautiful woman.”
“I noticed.”
“They’re murderous people, Dave.”
“The Balangies?”
“They claim to be descendants of Giordano Di Betto. Maybe they are. But Giordano Di Betto was not a killer. He was a victim, tortured and burned alive.”
“Why would Penelope Balangie give her daughter to a lecherous man like Shondell?”
“That’s the question she’ll use to draw you into her life.”
“Say again?”
“When you went to her house with Clete Purcel, did she make an appearance with a rosary?”
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“Yep, that’s Penelope,” he said. “Be careful what you touch, Dave. Roses have thorns.”
I went home. I wanted my badge back. In Louisiana the most powerful people in the parish are the sheriff and the tax accessor. If you’re smart, you treat the former with caution and send a Christmas card to the latter. At the time the events I describe took place, the sheriff’s department was involved in a disputed election that in effect had crippled the department, and my career rested in the hands of Internal Affairs, headed by Carroll LeBlanc, a former vice cop in New Orleans and an enemy of Clete Purcel.
Vice cops, male and female, have their own culture, one that is raw, depraved, and predatory. Many of the players are closet degenerates. Narcs and Treasury agents take enormous risks. Down on the border, they can suffer the fate of the damned if they fall into the wrong hands. Controlling the sex trade and human trafficking is another matter. Some undercover cops who work sex stings are mean to the bone and take a sadistic pleasure in their work. They set up drunks outside bars and gays in restrooms and ensure that the story makes the newspaper and the six o’clock news. Shorter version, they ruin careers and break up families. I knew one female vice cop who loved her role as a hooker and always made the same statement to the john when she busted him in the hotel room: “You came here to get fucked. Congratulations.”
LeBlanc had thick facial skin, like pork rind, and recessed dark eyes that could be attentive one moment and then listless or vaguely lascivious. There was a string of black moles under his left eye, like cinders that had blown from a fire. To my knowledge, he had never married. His interest in others was fleeting, as was his concentration. His sanctuary lay in his computer and his file drawers. He dressed like a bookie or a horse tout or a sharper in a card game. But there was nothing of Damon Runyon in Carroll LeBlanc. He was as nasty as they came.
We were in the old office in the courthouse. Through the window, I could see the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. A freight train was creaking down the tracks, wobbling on the rails that traversed New Iberia’s old red-light district. LeBlanc had stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles and opened a manila folder and propped it on his crotch. He glanced up and followed my line of sight out the window. His shirt was an immaculate white, his blue silk necktie draped on his stomach. “What are you looking at?”
“It’s funny how whorehouses and graveyards seem to go together,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder if South Louisiana isn’t a giant necropolis.”
“A what?”
I shrugged off my own comment; I regretted cluttering up the conversation. He was reviewing the charges that had cost me my badge. He made a sucking sound with his teeth. “Without authorization, you took Purcel to a crime scene on the St. Martin Parish line?”
“I needed his help,” I said.
“The St. Martin cops say Purcel left his shit-prints all over it.”
“He did six weeks in their stockade,” I said. “They have a long memory.”
“Maybe so. But I got to go with what’s in the file. There’s another problem here. You hid a confidential informant at your house. A black woman. There was a warrant on her.”
“A federal judge was going to expose her and confine her to a halfway house. Remember what happened to Barry Seal?”
“You weren’t dipping your wick, were you?”
“I’m going to forget you said that, Carroll.”
“So the federal court system is your enemy?” he said.
“Are you going to cut me some slack or not?”
“I thought you told everybody you were done with the department.”
“You know about those guys who got stuffed in a barrel?” I said.
“Down in Vermilion?”
“They braced me on the bayou.”