Desmond was furious. He paced up and down in his living room. He was wearing cargo pants and sandals and an LSU football jersey cut off at the armpits. He watched us dump his shelves, lift armfuls of clothes from his closets, shake drawers upside down on the beds, clean out the kitchen cabinets, tip over furniture, and pull the trays out of the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. His pale blue eyes looked psychotic, as though they had been clipped from a magazine and pasted on his face.
I think Desmond was bothered most by Bailey’s coldness as he watched her casually destroying the symmetry and order of his household. But the worst had yet to come. She took down the framed still shots excerpted from My Darling Clementine. She lifted each of them off its wall hook and pulled the cardboard backing loose from the steel frame, then dropped each onto the couch as she might a bit of trash.
“What are you looking for?” he said. “How could my framed pictures have anything to do with a murder investigation? You of all people, Bailey, you know better. Damn you, woman.”
“Please address me as Detective Ribbons. In answer to your question, we’ll look at whatever we need to.”
He started to pick up the frames and photos and squares of cardboard.
“Leave those where they are,” she said.
“A pox on all of you, Dave,” he said. “You motherfucker.”
“You jerked us around, Des,” I said. “You brought this on yourself.”
“How so?”
“You’re involved with a cult or a fetish or some kind of medieval romance that only lunatics could have invented,” I said. “You’ve been covering your ass or somebody else’s from the jump. Maybe if you stopped lying to people who are on your side, we wouldn’t have to tear your house apart.”
“Why don’t you start arresting Freemasons? Or guys with Gothic tats? You’re a fraud, Dave. You settled for mediocrity in your own life, and you resent anyone who went away and succeeded and then returned home and reminded you of your failure.”
I was in the midst of pulling the stuffing out of his couch. I straightened up and got rid of a crick in my back. “I’ve got news for you, Des. Some of us stayed here and fought the good fight while others left and joined the snobs who think their shit doesn’t stink.”
His left eye shrank into a pool of vitriol, one so intense that I wondered if I knew the real Desmond Cormier.
We went downstairs under the house where he parked his vehicles. He stayed right behind us, his hands knotting and unknotting. There was a huge pile of junk in one corner. It started at the floor and climbed to the ceiling and looked water-stained and moldy at the base.
“What’s that?” I said.
“The detritus of Hurricane Rita when my house was flooded. The trash my guests leave behind.”
Three more deputies in uniform pulled in. “Just in time,” I said to them. “Get your latex on, fellows.”
“You enjoying this, Dave?” Desmond said.
“No, I’m not. I always thought you represented everything that’s good in us. I thought you were a great artist and director, one for the ages.”
He looked like someone had struck a kitchen match on his stomach lining. Behind him, Sean McClain pulled a black gym bag from the pile and shook out a towel, a Ziploc bag with a bar of soap in it, a sweatshirt, a spray can of men’s deodorant, a pair of Levi’s, and a flowery blouse. Then he shook the bag again. A tennis shoe fell out.
“Better take a look at this, Dave,” Sean said.
“What do you have?”
Sean hooked his finger inside the shoe and lifted it from the pile. The shoe was lime green with blue stripes. “Size seven. Just like the one we found in the surf.”
I looked at Desmond. “What do you have to say?”
“I don’t know whose bag that is, and I never saw that shoe. Lucinda Arceneaux wore one like it?”
“Sell your doodah to somebody else,” I said.
“Am I under arrest?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t plan any trips.”
“So you’re finished here?” he said.
Bailey stepped close to him, her eyes burning into his face. “Do yourself a favor. Stop acting like a twit and own up. You’re an embarrassment.”
His face twitched at the insult. I didn’t know Des was still that vulnerable.
“Let’s get back to work,” I said. “Lay everything out on the lawn.”
That afternoon, Lucinda Arceneaux’s father identified the flowery blouse as his daughter’s. He was unsure about the Levi’s, but the size matched the clothes still hanging in her closet. There was no doubt the tennis shoe was hers. At four that afternoon I told Helen about everything I had.
“Okay, I’ll talk to the DA’s office in the morning,” she said.
“Why not get an arrest warrant today? Don’t give Desmond a chance to blow Dodge.”
“We’ll see what the prosecutor says. I don’t think the clothes and shoe will be enough. The gym bag could belong to Butterworth.”
“Butterworth is not our guy. Or at least not our primary guy.”
“Why?”
“He wears his vices too openly. He’s a showboat.”
“Why your certainty about Desmond Cormier?”
“The killer is an iconoclast.”
“A what?”
“A breaker of images and totems. But our guy is also infatuated with them.”
“Sorry, that sounds like the kind of stuff Bailey comes up with.”
“What does it take?” I asked. “Desmond has been playing us from the day we pulled Lucinda Arceneaux out of the water.”
“But playing us about what? Most of his denial has to do with the source of his money. That doesn’t make him a killer. Besides, Lucinda Arceneaux was his half sister, for God’s sake.”
“The issues are one and the same. The homicide is connected to money.”
“We don’t know that,” she said.
“Speak for yourself.”
“Cool out, Pops. We’re going to nail him, but right now I’m not sure for what.”
“Great choice of a verb.”
“I love you, bwana, but sometimes I think I committed an unpardonable sin in a former life, and you were put here to give me a second chance.”
“What if Desmond is our guy and he does it again?”
“I have a hard time thinking of him as a serial killer.”
“Our guy is not a serial killer. There’s a method to his madness.”
She didn’t answer; she obviously had given up the argument.
“What if he’s protecting the murderer and the murderer kills someone else?” I said. “Maybe another young woman like Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“You just made sure I won’t sleep tonight,” she replied.
The next day, we went to work on the origins of the bag. It had come from an online vendor in California that had gone out of business five years ago. There were latents on the deodorant can, but they weren’t in the system. Bailey came into my office. “I just got a call from Butterworth.”
“He called you? You didn’t call him first?”
“He said he wants to come in.”
“With an attorney?”
“No. He said he wants to clear the air.”
In any investigation a cop looks for what we call “the weak sister.” I believed we had just found ours. “Call him back. Tell him we’ll meet him in City Park at noon.”
“Not here?”
“We want him to feel comfortable, as though he’s among friends.”
“Sounds a little deceitful.”
“These guys invented deceit.”
“Okay,” she said. “Want to get together this evening?”
“Sure.”
“Because that’s not the impression I’ve been having.”
“You shouldn’t think that way, Bailey.”