“I couldn’t care less about your peccadilloes,” he said. “The issue is otherwise. You’re trying to degrade me while pretending you’re not.”
“Did you put LSD in the food of a housemaid so you could film and ridicule her?”
Then he surprised me. “Yes, it was unconscionable. I’ve done many things I regret.” His gaze fixed on me, then he looked away, detached, as though he had gone somewhere else.
Sean removed stacks of books from a shelf and placed them on the bed, then began searching the closet. The books included titles by Lee Child, Frederick Forsyth, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and a history of the Crusades. But the one that caught my eye was an ostrich-skin-bound scrapbook stuffed with photographs and postcards and handwritten and typed letters, yellowed with age and pasted to the pages.
“I would prefer that you not look at that,” Butterworth said. “Nothing in it is related to your investigation.”
I began turning the pages. Each was as stiff as cardboard. The backdrop was obviously Africa: wild animals grazing on grasslands backdropped by mountains capped with snow, army six-bys loaded with black soldiers carrying AK-47s and Herstal assault rifles, arid villages where every child had the same bloated stomach and hollow eyes and skeletal face. I could almost hear the buzzing of the flies.
“Which countries were these taken in?” I asked.
“Many of these places don’t even have names,” he replied.
“The guys in those trucks look like friends of Gaddafi and Castro,” I said.
“They’re friends of whoever pays them,” he said.
The next page I turned was pasted over with an eight-by-ten color photograph that slipped in and out of focus, as though the eye wanted to reject it. The huts on either side of a dirt road were burning. A column of troops was walking into a red sun, some of the men looking at bodies strewn along the roadside. A withered and toothless old man wearing only short pants and sandals was sitting with one leg bent under him, his arms outstretched, begging for mercy. The bodies of a woman and a child lay like broken dolls next to him. A soldier stood behind him, a machete hanging from a thong on his wrist.
I held the page open in front of Butterworth. “You had a hand in this?”
“Did I participate in it? No. Was I there? I took the photograph.”
“Did you try to stop it?”
“My head would have been used for a soccer ball.”
“Who was the commanding officer?”
“An African thug who was a friend of Idi Amin.”
“What was your role?”
“Adviser.”
I closed the book and dropped it on the bed. “Get up.”
“What for?”
“You need to be in a different place.”
I walked him through the living room and out on the deck, my fingers biting into his arm. I unlocked his cuffs and hooked him around the rail, the sun beating down on his face, his eyes still dilated and now watering. He was clearly trying not to blink. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t like you. How often do you shoot up?”
“Sorry, I won’t discuss my private life with you.”
“Did you shoot up Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“Alafair told me your friend Purcel fought on the side of the leftists in El Salvador.”
“What about it?”
“He never told you what went on down there? The atrocities committed by the cretins your government trained at the School of the Americas?”
“I’m going to leave you out here for a few minutes, and then we’ll be taking you to the jail. In the meantime I think it would be to your advantage if you shut your mouth.”
“You don’t know why you hate and fear me, do you?” he asked.
“What?”
“I symbolize the ruinous consequence of America’s decision to abandon the republic that the entire world admired and loved. You see me and realize how much you have lost.”
I wanted to believe he was mad, a sybaritic, narcotic-fueled cynic determined to transfer his pathogens to the rest of us. With his hands cuffed to the deck rail, the wind flattening his clothes against his body, he looked like the twisted figure in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.
“Tell me I’m mistaken,” he said.
I went back into the bedroom.
“What was that about?” Bailey said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Did you find anything else?”
She shook her head.
“Bag up the scrapbook and the stuff in the hatbox,” I said to Sean. “I’ll put Butterworth in the cruiser.”
“This bust bothers me,” Bailey said. “We might have some legal problems. Like a liability suit.”
“Not if Lucinda Arceneaux’s DNA is on that needle,” I said.
“But you know it’s not, don’t you?” she said. “Why do you have it in for this guy?”
I didn’t answer. I collected Butterworth from the deck and hooked him to a D-ring in the back of the cruiser. Bailey and I got in the front and drove up the long narrow two-lane toward New Iberia, the palm fronds on the roadside rattling dryly in the wind, the waves chopping against the boats in their slips. She glanced sideways at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and winked. “I think you’re a nice guy. That’s all.”
That was when I knew that the folly of age is a contagion that spares no man, not unless he is fortunate enough to die young.
Chapter Fourteen
We booked Butterworth and transferred him to the parish prison. That evening Desmond turned in to my driveway in a new Cherokee. He seemed to wear his contradictions as you would a suit of clothes. I had a bell, but he tapped lightly on the door. I had a sidewalk, but he walked on the lawn, even though it was damp from the sprinkler. The lightness of his touch on the door was not in sync with the intensity in his face and the corded veins in his forearms.
I looked at him through the screen. “If this is about Butterworth, I’ll talk to you at the department during office hours.”
“Antoine is my friend,” he said. “So are you. I’d like to speak with you in that spirit.”
I stepped out on the gallery. The light had pooled high in the sky, like an inverted golden bowl; the oaks in the yard were deep in shadow, the trunks surrounded by red and yellow four-o’clocks that bloomed only in the shade.
Desmond’s wide-set pale blue eyes were unblinking and yet simultaneously veiled; they had the vacuity you see in the eyes of sociopaths.
“Let Butterworth take his own fall,” I said.
“He hasn’t done anything.”
“Have you seen the photos in his scrapbook?”
“Maybe he does a different kind of penance than the rest of us. Hollywood is a place of second chances. More important, it’s a place where there are no victims. Everyone there knows the rules and the odds. Why beat up on Antoine?”
“On the phone you said we’d strip-mine the Garden of Eden if the price was right. You grew up in Eden?”
“What are you saying, Dave?”
“You lived on a piece of reservation hardpan that was given to the Indians only because the whites didn’t want it.”
“Better put, they wouldn’t spit on it,” he said. “What’s your point?”
“The casino made life a little better for some of your people. You think that was a bad idea? Why don’t you cut the rest of us some slack? Most of us do the best we can.”
“I thought I could reason with you,” he said. “That was a mistake. I’d better go before I say something I’ll regret.”