“No, I was lying to her.”
“How about the dye on the money?”
“That’s true. It’s not much, but it’s there. The serial numbers are not in the FBI database, so maybe the money is from a source that can’t report the loss.”
“Go on,” I said.
“She said Melancon would take her to hookups in the Quarter, in-and-out deals that didn’t have the approval of Adonis. The night Melancon got killed, the john was a guy with a face like a snake. He said his name was Gideon. He gave her the thirty grand.”
“For what reason?”
“Try to process this: She has to get out of the life. The john is a combo of Billy Graham and Reinhard Heydrich.”
“It’s funny you used Heydrich’s name.”
“What about it?” Dana said.
“His middle name was Tristan.”
“So what? Look, there’s something else. The black hooker says the john called himself a revelator. You ever hear anything like that?”
“Yeah, last night, from a woman with ties to Adonis Balangie.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said Adonis warned her about a guy calling himself that.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“She’s not a player.”
“Like Penelope Balangie is not a player?”
I didn’t reply.
“A ghoul was carrying your address,” he said. “While you’re busy inserting yourself into the Balangie family’s inner workings. Notice my choice of words.”
“I appreciate your concern, Dana. But you’re mischaracterizing the situation.”
“I tried.”
“You ever deal with Mark Shondell?”
“Shondell wouldn’t take the time to piss on us if we were burning to death,” he replied. “You never cease to astound me, Dave. Have a nice day.”
The line went dead. In all the years I had known him, Dana Magelli had never hung up on me.
That evening I drove to the treatment center in North Baton Rouge where Johnny Shondell had checked in for a minimum stay of a month. I suspected one month would be for openers. You don’t have to die to visit Dante’s Ninth Circle. Junk is a culture unto itself. The body, the brain, and the soul are the property of the dealer. Street addicts knowingly inject themselves with AIDS and hepatitis rather than face withdrawal. When it comes to satisfying the addiction, no form of depravity is off the table. How does anyone get himself in that kind of shape? It’s easy. You’ve got snakes in your head, the rattling of Gatling guns in your ears, and a sense of despair as bottomless as the Grand Canyon, and voilà, here comes the candy man, who offers you a ride on the big white horse, and with just a little poke in the arm, you’re galloping through a field of flowers.
Johnny’s cottage was nestled among azalea bushes under a gnarled oak with limbs so big and heavy they touched the ground like giant elbows. By the tree was a stone bench green with lichen and age and the coldness that seemed to live permanently in the layer of leaves that had turned black and yellow and slick on the ground. The surroundings reminded me of the graveyard behind Father Julian Hebert’s church in Jeanerette, and I wondered if this was not perhaps a reminder of the tenuous grasp we have on our lives.
I sat with Johnny on the bench. He was wearing an Australian infantry hat and a brown wool jacket zipped up to the throat, and in the dim light, he could have been one of the poor fellows in the trenches at Gallipoli waiting to go over the top into Turkish machine-gun fire, with the same dread of the grave, with the same heart-draining sense of abandonment.
“How are they treating you, Johnny?” I said.
“Fine,” he said, looking at the shadows.
“When did you go on the spike?”
“A year ago,” he said.
“Why’d you do it?”
“Probably the same reason people climb in a bottle.”
“You wanted to?” I said.
“Nobody held a gun on me.”
“You’re looking good,” I lied.
“Think so?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where’d you get the digger hat?” He didn’t understand what I meant. “The Aussies call those ‘digger hats’ because the prospectors in the Outback wore them.”
He took off the hat and brushed a strand of Spanish moss off the brim, then put it back on. “Maybe don’t tell anybody about this, huh?”
“Your hat?”
“Isolde sent it to me. There wasn’t a return address, but I know it was from her. She knew I wanted one.”
“I’m at a loss about something, Johnny. Your uncle Mark has no feelings about others. Why cover for a man who has done such harm to you and Isolde?”
“Uncle Mark is a man of destiny.”
“What kind of destiny?”
“He won’t say. Something big.”
“Marcel LaForchette was a button man for the Balangie family; more specifically, he helped whack a child molester from New Iberia. I had the impression the molester might have been an employee or a member of your family.”
“I don’t want you talking about the Shondells like that, Mr. Dave. Besides, why would Uncle Mark hire a guy who had killed one of his relatives?”
Because Marcel LaForchette might end up a sack of fertilizer in your rose garden, I thought.
“Know any revelators?” I asked.
His face drained. “Where’d you hear about revelators?”
“Know a guy named Gideon?”
“Gideon Richetti?”
“Yeah, that might be the guy.” I had no idea what Gideon’s last name was. “You’re buds with this character?”
“Don’t do this to me, Mr. Dave. I’m already falling apart.”
“My address was found in his room in the French Quarter.”
Johnny’s lips were gray and chapped, his eyes lustrous, as though he had a fever. I could smell an odor rising from inside his shirt. “You have to get away from Gideon,” he said.
“He’s a killer?”
“He travels through time. He’s the guy who hung up Mr. Clete.”
“Gideon is the guy who almost burned Clete to death?”
“Yeah, what does it take to get that across?” Johnny said. He caught the tone in his voice and wiped his mouth. “I’ve been trying to tell you, Mr. Dave, but you don’t listen. Don’t mess with things you can’t understand. The same goes for Mr. Clete.”
“Do you know how unhinged all this sounds?” I said.
He lowered his head, his hands balled in his lap. I had made a mistake, one that in my case was inexcusable. Many people do not understand that drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety. The combination of the two is devastating. An outsider has no comprehension of the misery that a clinically depressed person carries. The pain is like dealing with an infected gland. One touch and the entire system tries to shut down, because the next stop might be the garden of Gethsemane.
“You working the steps?” I said.
“I’m trying to.”
“You feel like you have broken glass in your head?”
“I don’t know what I feel. I don’t feel anything.”
“Here’s how recovery works, Johnny. When you dry out or get clean, you have memories that are like scars on the soul. You accept the things you did when you were high or drunk, so you feel like you’re living in a nightmare that belongs to someone else. In some ways, it’s like a soldier returning from war. He finds himself a stranger in the land he fought to protect. Except a drunk or drug addict gets no medals and has no honorable memories.”
Johnny stared at the brick cottage he had been assigned. It was in deep shadow now, the windowpanes dark, faintly luminescent, like obsidian. “I brought my Gibson.”
“Why don’t you get it?”
He went inside and returned with his Super Jumbo acoustic guitar hanging from his neck. He sat down on the bench and made an E chord and rippled the plectrum across the strings. Then he sang “Born to Be with You” by the Chordettes. The driving rhythm of the music and the content of the lyrics were like a wind sweeping across a sandy beach. I don’t know how he did it. It was stunning to listen to Johnny sing it, because his voice, his lungs, and his heart seemed disconnected from the hollow look in his eyes. As I listened, I wanted to tear Mark Shondell apart.