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• • •
TUESDAY MORNING, WE got a search warrant on the entirety of Desmond’s house at Cypremort Point. It was a hard sell. Previously, we had been granted a search warrant on the part of the house considered the living area of Antoine Butterworth. The district attorney had to convince the judge that Desmond was a viable suspect in the death of Lucinda Arceneaux. The truth was otherwise. Desmond was a walking contradiction: a Leonardo, a humanist, a man who had the body of a Greek god, a man who would hang from the skid of a helicopter and then bully one of his subordinates. The DA got lost in his own vagueness and asked the judge if I could speak.
“Since you don’t seem to be informed about your own investigation, I would be happy to hear from Detective Robicheaux,” the judge said. He was a Medal of Honor recipient and had thick snow-white hair and was probably too old for the bench, but his patrician manners and soft plantation dialect were such a fond reminder of an earlier, more genteel culture that we didn’t want to lose him. “Good morning, Detective Robicheaux. What is it you have to say, suh?”
“Desmond Cormier has been elusive and uncooperative since the beginning of our investigation, Your Honor,” I said. “Through a telescope on Mr. Cormier’s deck, I saw the deceased, Lucinda Arceneaux, tied to a cross floating in Weeks Bay. I asked Mr. Cormier to look through the telescope and tell me what he saw. He denied seeing anything. The deputy with me, Sean McClain, looked through the telescope and saw the same thing I had.”
“The body?” the judge said.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“I don’t know if that’s enough to grant you a warrant, Detective.”
“Mr. Cormier also broke in to the home of Deputy Frenchie Lautrec after Lautrec took his life or was killed by others. Lautrec had a tattoo of a Maltese cross on one leg. Desmond Cormier has one, too. I’ve seen it. We have reason to believe that Lautrec may have been involved both with prostitution and the series of the murders in our area. I believe Mr. Cormier may have been an associate of Deputy Lautrec.”
I had overreached the boundaries of probability and even the boundaries of truth, but by this time, I didn’t care about either.
“I am deeply disturbed by the implications in this investigation and the paucity of evidence it has produced,” the judge said. I absolutely loved his diction. “Your warrant i
s granted. I recommend you conduct your search in such a way that there will be no evidentiary problems when the person or persons who committed these crimes is brought into court. We are all sickened and saddened by what has occurred in our community. Good luck to you, gentlemen.”
One hour later, Sean McClain, Bailey, and I began ripping apart Desmond’s house.
• • •
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.”
