Robicheaux

by James Lee Burke

  I sometimes saw Levon’s wife at Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette, in boxing trunks and a halter, sweaty and dedicated, slamming the body bag hard enough to rattle it on the chain. She was Australian and had dark hair and wide-set blue eyes that stared boldly into your face. She seldom spoke or smiled, and if she had any expression, it seemed to be one of puzzlement or wariness, as though the world were constantly deconstructing and reassembling itself before her eyes.

  Before I could get out of the limo and ring the bell, Levon and Rowena came out the front door. Levon put his wife inside the limo, then leaned across the seat and shook Jimmy’s hand vigorously. “It’s very nice to meet you, sir. This is my wife, Rowena. Thank you for your kind invitation. How you doin’, Dave?”

  That was Levon, the effusive gentleman no matter the occasion. But his cordiality had no influence on what was about to take place. Jimmy’s eyes were glued on Rowena’s. The connection was electric and naked to the degree that both of them were obviously embarrassed. She sat down heavily on the leather seat, her gaze never leaving Jimmy’s. “You’re a screenwriter?” she asked him.

  “Not really. I try at it.”

  “Does anyone have a drink?” she said.

  “I started to ice some champagne, but I didn’t think we’d be long in getting to the restaurant,” Jimmy said.

  “We’re fine,” Levon said.

  “I’m starved and dry,” she said. “Can we get the bloody hell out of here?”

  “Right-o,” Jimmy said. He tapped the glass behind the driver.

  “Is this your vehicle?” Levon said.

  “My vehicle? No, it belongs to the car service,” Jimmy replied clearly, not sure what was happening. “I’m not that uptown.”

  “Hello, Miss Rowena. I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said. “I’ve seen you at Red’s health club in Lafayette.”

  “You’re who?”

  “We spoke on the phone.”

  Her window was up. She stared at her reflection in the dark. Then she turned and looked at Jimmy again, as though seeing him for the first time. Levon leaned forward, interdicting her line of sight. “You keep company with Bobby Earl, Mr. Nightingale?”

  “Call me Jimmy. I know Earl, but I wouldn’t call him a close friend.”

  “A friend nonetheless?” Levon said.

  “Judge not, lest you be judged,” Jimmy said.

  “What’s to judge? His record is demonstrable, isn’t it?” Levon said. “If he had his way, the bunch of us would be soap.”

  “I think he’s paid for his sins,” Jimmy said.

  “His time in prison?” Levon said.

  “Considering the ethnic makeup of the population, I suspect he found himself in the middle of a nightmare,” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t think that’s much solace to the victims of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “Oh, shove it along, you two,” Rowena said. She massaged the back of her neck and rotated her head, glancing sideways at Jimmy.

  “Good advice,” Jimmy said, reaching for something on the floor.

  Rowena rolled down her window, flooding the limo with the smell of night-blooming flowers and the sprinklers spinning on the St. Augustine grass in the dark. “Look at the stars. Did you ever see Night Has a Thousand Eyes? When the constellations are out, I always think of that movie. Look, each star is vaporous.”

  “What do you have there?” Levon asked.

  “A sword,” Jimmy said, lifting it into the light. “I think it belonged to your great-grandfather. I’d like you to have it.”

  Levon looked at the name incised on the handle. “My God, where did you get this?”

  “Did anybody hear me?” Rowena said. “Has anyone seen Night Has a Thousand Eyes?”

  “I have,” Jimmy said. He pushed the sword away when Levon tried to return it. “It starred Edward G. Robinson and Gail Russell. Did you see her in Angel and the Badman or Wake of the Red Witch?”

  “Yes,” Rowena said, her face thrust forward, her wide-set eyes filled with interest.

  “How about rolling up the window, Rowena?” Levon said. “The air smells like insecticide.”

  “If that’s what everyone wants,” she replied.

  “Listen here,” Levon said. “I can’t accept this gift.”

  “Maybe we can give it to a museum,” Jimmy said. “It needs to be somewhere other than in the hands of its previous owner.”

  Levon waited for Jimmy to continue.

  “I got it from Fat Tony Nemo. He bought it at a flea market,” Jimmy said.

  “You know Nemo?” Levon said.

  “He poured the concrete for a couple of my buildings.”

  “I forgot. He does that when he’s not killing people,” Levon said.

  “Tony was out of the rackets twenty years ago,” Jimmy said.

  “Is that right, Dave?” Levon said. “This guy who used to break arms and legs with a baseball bat found salvation?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I replied, regretting the choices I had made to help Clete.

  “Could you tell your driver to go a little faster?” Rowena said to Jimmy. “I’m about to faint.”

  “No Down Under histrionics tonight,” Levon said.

  “Oh, balls,” she said.

  “I need to write you a check for this,” Levon said to Jimmy.

  “Show me the secret to your novels instead.”

  “Beg your pardon?” Levon said.

  “I’m envious. They’re marvelous books. Your prose is magical. I want to know how you do it.”

  Then Rowena said something I didn’t expect, considering the undisguised arousal Jimmy obviously caused in her: “We all have our private cubbyholes, love. Don’t be fucking with them.”

  The chauffeur was a peroxided, crew-cut, steroid-pumped weight lifter with a concave-shaped face whose eyes looked like lumps of lead in the rearview mirror. I wanted to get in the front with him.

  * * *

  CLEMENTINE’S WAS ON Main Street in a building that once was a saloon and pool hall and betting parlor, with wood floors and a stamped tin ceiling and a long bar and cuspidors and a potbelly stove, in a time when saloon owners one night a week covered pool tables with oilcloths and served free robin gumbo. Now it was a fine restaurant, with a large formally attired staff and sometimes a famous movie actor or musician among the guests.

  Unfortunately, none of this was of any comfort to me. The atmosphere at our table was poisonous, the tension unbearable, primarily because there was no way to both acknowledge and resolve the problem, which was raw hatred between Jimmy and Levon and, I suspect, a flicker or two of the green-eyed monster in Levon.

  “You understood about my writing a check, didn’t you?” Levon said.

  “If you want,” Jimmy said.

  “There’s no ‘if’ to it.”

  Jimmy smiled. “I think I gave him two thousand for it. Why don’t you give that amount in my name to a charity?”

  “Why don’t I just leave it on the table for the waiter?” Levon said.

  Rowena was on her third glass of burgundy. “My grandfather was at Gallipoli. A neighbor tried to give him a souvenir bayonet to cut his hundredth birthday cake. Grandfather told him where to park it.”

  “Lower the volume, Rowena,” Levon said.

  “Fuck if I will,” she replied.

  How about that for conversation in a small city on Bayou Teche where decorum is a religion and manners and morality are interchangeable?

  The back of my neck was burning, my scalp drawing tighter each time Rowena had something to say. I went to the restroom, located in a separate building by the patio, and washed and dried my face and went back inside. The bar area was crowded, but in the midst of drinkers, I saw Clete Purcel hunched over a po’boy sandwich and a frosted mug of beer.

  When I went to places where alcohol was served, I usually avoided sitting at the bar or at tables where people were there to drink rather than eat. Those distinctions might seem foolish to normal people, but the
slip that puts a sober alcoholic back on the dirty boogie usually has innocuous origins. You accidentally eat chocolate cake that has whiskey in it; there’s brandy in the plum sauce; two miles from shore, the sun blazing on your head, a friend tosses you a cold can of Miller from the ice chest; or worse, you wake at one in morning, your head full of nightmarish images, and rather than deal with your dragons, you put on your beat-up leather jacket and a wilted hat and find an end-of-the-line dive that has no clocks or windows.

  But I wanted to be near Clete, the man who’d carried me down a fire escape when I had two bullets in my back, a man who sought excoriation and feared approval, a blue-collar iconoclast who had to look up the word.

  “Can you tell me how to get to Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room?” I said. Sharkey’s joint on Bourbon used to feature musicians like the Kings of Dixieland and Johnnie Scat Davis and Louis Prima and Sam Butera, and Clete and I had spent many wasted days and nights there.

  Clete jumped when I put my hand on his shoulder. “Jesus, Dave, you know I have a coronary when people walk up on me like that? When did you come in?”

  “I’m with Jimmy Nightingale and Levon and his wife.”

  “You’re kidding.” He strained his neck to see into the dining room. “Oops, I shouldn’t have looked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That Australian broad gets to me. My big boy just went on red alert.”

  “Will you stop that?”

  “I know an animal when I see one.”

  “I mean it, Clete.” But what was the point? Clete was Clete. “Join us. I feel like I’m in the middle of a blender.”

  “I can’t take Nightingale. I know he’s cutting me a deal, but he’s still a bum and a fraud.”

  “But it’s fine for me?” I said.

  “Stop pretending. Nightingale hates my guts. I don’t know what you see in that prick. Anyway, he’s doing a favor for you, not me. He wants something from Levon Broussard. So does Tony Nine Ball.”

  “Where’d you hear this?”

  “From Nig Rosewater.”

  Nig and Wee Willie Bimstine had run New Orleans’s oldest bail bond service, until Katrina drowned the city and FEMA transported their clients all over the United States, never to return.

  “Tony thinks he’s going to be a Hollywood movie producer,” Clete said. “He bought this sword to give to Levon Broussard, except Nightingale took it away from him.”

  “When did Fat Tony start rolling over for anyone?”

  “He’s got diabetes and emphysema and cancer in his colon and lymph nodes. He carries a bucket in his car to puke in.”

  The bartender leaned close to Clete. “Would you like another drink, sir?”

  Clete lifted his mug, the shell of ice sliding down the sides, the beer almost to the top. “Do I look like I need one? But since you asked, give Dave a diet Doc with cherries and limes in it.”

  The man on the other side of Clete left the bar, and I took his stool with no plan in mind other than to delay rejoining the group I’d come with. In seconds I felt at home, the television set tuned to a sports channel, stuffed shrimp I hadn’t ordered placed on a paper napkin in front of me, someone talking about the New Orleans Saints. Clete ordered a shot and poured it into his mug. I watched the whiskey bounce on the bottom and rise in a brown cloud.

  “Why not just put your brain in a jar and give it to a medical school?” I said.

  “I did that five years ago. They gave it back.”

  He chugged half the mug. I bit into a stuffed shrimp and looked over my shoulder at the dining room, then at the icy cloud rising from the beer box, the bartenders uncorking bottles of Liebfraumilch and dark red wine, fitting an orange slice on the rim of a Collins glass, tipping a jigger of Jack into shaved ice and mint leaves, pouring a creamy-pink gin fizz, setting up a round of Hennessy for everyone, provided by the distributor.

  “No?” the bartender said, after setting a shot glass in front of me.

  I cleared my throat to answer.

  “Did he ask for one?” Clete said.

  “Sorry, my mistake,” the bartender said.

  “Give us both a diet Doc. I need a bowl of gumbo, too,” Clete said.

  “You got it,” the bartender said.

  “Where you from?” Clete asked.

  “California.”

  “You ever hear of the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide?”

  “That’s a new one on me,” the bartender said. He wore a white jacket, his hair slicked back.

  “You’re looking at them,” Clete said. “You’re standing in the middle of history.”

  “Knock it off, Clete,” I said.

  “He knows I’m kidding,” Clete said. “You, what’s-your-name, you don’t take people like me seriously, do you?”

  “My name is Cedric.”

  “You knew I was kidding, right, Cedric?”

  The bartender wiped the bar. “Two diet drinks coming up.”

  He walked away on the duckboards, wadding up his bar rag, tossing it into a sink. My face felt small and tight; my eardrums were ringing. “Don’t do that again, Clete.”

  “He’s foisting drinks on people. I set him straight.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Climb down off it, Streak.”

  “Off what?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “I gave up trying to pork everything in sight. Why? Because I’m old and I make an idiot of myself. It’s called recognizing your limitations.”

  “See you later,” I said.

  “Come back here.”

  But I kept walking, letting the noise in the dining room swallow up my conversation with Clete and the temptations that were as abiding in me as sexual desire and, even worse, that had to do with guns and gambling and the rush of stepping through the dimension into a place I never wanted to go again.

  Levon and Rowena and Jimmy were sloshed and had stupid smiles on their faces when I got to the table.

  “Sorry, something just came up,” I said.

  “You’re leaving?” Levon said.

  “We’ll do it another time,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me.”

  “You got your nose bent out of shape?” Rowena said. “Just throw the food to the hogs?”

  “Chacun à son goût,” I said.

  Then I walked out of the dining room and past the revelers at the bar, including Clete, and out the door and into the night. The street was empty, the great looming structure called the Shadows illuminated by floodlights in the yard, a tribute to all the suffering passed down to us by the antebellum era. What a joke, I thought.

  But my cynicism gave me no release from the fire and the insatiable need burning inside me.

  CLETE CALLED ME at the office in the morning. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

  “Forget it. I had my head on sideways,” I said.

  “You didn’t go home and get wasted, did you?”

  “Worry about yourself,” I said.

  “I’ll see you for lunch.”

  “I’ve got too much desk work.”

  “I’ll come by tonight. It’s about that prick.”

  “Which prick?”

  “That prick Nightingale, who else? I’ve got to pick up a bail skip in Jennings. I’ll see you about nine.”

  At five-fifteen P.M., I threw my tackle box and rod and reel into the back of my truck, hooked up my boat and trailer, and drove to the Henderson levee, outside Breaux Bridge. Henderson Swamp is part of the vast network of bayous and bays and rivers that constitute the Atchafalaya Basin, the flooded woods a golden green at sunset and so swollen with silence that you wonder if this piece of primordial creation was saved by a divine hand to remind us of what the earth was like when our ancestors grew feet and crawled out of the sea.

  The cypress trees were in early leaf, as delicate as green lace, ruffling in the breeze, the water high and black and undisturbed, chained with lily pads, t
he bream and goggle-eye perch rolling under the pads like pillows of air floating to the surface.

  I cut my outboard and let my boat glide silently into a cove lit by a molten red sun, then flipped my plug in an arching loop just beyond a clutch of flooded willows. The western sky was streaked with clouds as pink as flamingo wings. In the distance I heard the Southern Pacific blowing down the line.

  But if I had come here for solace, my journey was in vain. The loss of my wife, my inability to accept the suddenness of the accident, the words of a paramedic telling me she was gone and they had done everything they could, his mouth moving like that of someone in a film with no sound track, I carried all these things wherever I went, my blood and mind fouled, the ground shifting, the realization at sunrise that her death was not a dream and she was gone forever, unfairly taken, her dignity and courage and spiritual resolve extinguished by a fool rounding a curve in a pickup truck, the accelerator mashed to the floor.

  These thoughts robbed the light from my eyes, the birdsong from the trees, the sound of children playing in a park. Instead of the glory of the sunset, I saw beer cans and Styrofoam cups undulating in the shallows, a rubber tire submerged among the willows, a blanket of debris caught in the cattails, as viscous as dried paint skimmed off the top of a paint bucket.

  I retrieved my lure and started the engine and drove back to the levee, the bow scraping on the concrete ramp like fingernails on a blackboard. I stopped into a bait shop and ate a sandwich on the gallery and watched the last of the sun slip beyond the trees. Several men were drinking beer at a spool table next to me. I believed I knew one of them, but I couldn’t say for sure. They invited me to join them. I could not get my mind off Molly, her warmth and steadfastness as a companion, her ability to deal with the sorrow and suffering of the world and not be undone by it.

  “Everything cool, buddy?” a man said.