Robicheaux

by James Lee Burke

“Sure. I look like my gyroscope is busted?” I replied.

  “Have a brew.”

  “I have to be on my way.”

  “I should, too,” he said. “My old lady is going to throw my supper in the backyard. Is yours like that?”

  * * *

  THE SUN WAS only an ember when I drove down the levee. A few minutes later, I was on the two-lane highway outside Breaux Bridge, the sky dark with rainclouds, when a pickup truck got on the back of my trailer and the driver clicked on his high beams, flooding the inside of my truck with light. I tried to see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror, but his headlights were blinding. I touched my brake pedal to no avail. I had broken the clamp-on emergency flasher I’d carried in my truck only two days earlier. There were ditches on either side of the road and no shoulder where I could pull off. My eyes were watering from the glare in the mirror.

  Like anyone who has been harassed on the road by a tailgater, I felt my anger begin to rise, slowly at first, then build into an emotional straitjacket, and I began to have thoughts I did not associate with who I was. I pressed the brake again, this time hard. But he didn’t back off. His headlights were so close they were beneath the level of my trailer. I accelerated. He dropped back a few feet in the mirror, and I saw a pipe bumper welded on the front of his vehicle. Then he came at me again. As I neared the convenience store at the intersection, he roared through the blinking red light and shot me the finger.

  The truck was pale blue, one side gnarled with dents, one taillight broken. I saw the driver for only seconds. His hair was black, his face unshaved; he looked like thousands of Cajun men.

  I drove home, my wrists throbbing. Clete was sitting on the steps, tossing acorns at nothing, a fedora slanted on his brow.

  * * *

  I PULLED MY trailer around his Caddy and parked it on the grass. The leaves crackled under my feet as I crossed the yard. He sniffed.

  “You have a cold?” I asked.

  “I smell beer.”

  “I was sitting next to some guys at a bait shop.”

  His eyes searched my face. I looked away, down the street. The streetlamps were on, rain dripping from the oaks. The sidewalk was arched in the places where the oak roots had broken through the concrete. The only sound was the whir of automobile tires on the street.

  “I told Nightingale to stick his deal,” Clete said.

  “You’re not going to work it out with him?”

  “You don’t work out things with a guy like Nightingale. You park one in his ear.”

  “When did you get this bright idea?”

  “Last night. I couldn’t sleep. I felt dirty all over.”

  “What are you going to do, Clete?”

  “Nig and Wee Willie will front me a hundred thousand.”

  “At what interest rate?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “How much do you owe?”

  “Altogether, with loans all over the city and back interest and my maxed-out credit cards and the vigorish and principle with the shylocks, close to two hundred and fifty thou.”

  “How’d you do this, Clete?”

  “Why don’t you try to make me feel bad?”

  I sat down next to him. “I’ll get a loan on the house.”

  “Not for me, you won’t.”

  “I’ll do it whether you like it or not.”

  He shook his head, his hands between his knees. “What can they do?”

  “You know what they can do.”

  “I’ll go out smoking.”

  “Why did you change your mind about Nightingale’s offer?”

  “This skip I had to pick up in Jennings is a pimp and meth dealer. His name is Kevin Penny. Ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “This is the third time I’ve had to go after him. I almost capped him once. In custody. His little boy told the welfare worker what Penny did to him. I knew what he was going to do to his kid when he made the street.” He stopped and tapped his fists up and down on his thighs.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I’m not being honest. Earlier, Penny told me about what a sleaze Nightingale was. You think Nightingale is a gentleman or something, but I know better. Nonetheless, I was going to take the deal with him. I didn’t want to lose my place in the Quarter. Whatever principles I have, I was willing to sell them out.”

  “So what did this guy Penny tell you?”

  “He delivered coke to Nightingale’s house. And a girl or two.”

  “Every one of these guys has a story like that. They’ve sold dope to George W. Bush or set up trysts for John Kennedy. Don’t buy into this crap, Clete.”

  “Penny says he’s deposited money in a bank account of a company owned by Nightingale. He was even taught how to structure it. To make the deposits in amounts of less than ten thousand so the bank doesn’t report it to the IRS.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Those eight women who were killed,” Clete said. “They haunt me.”

  He wasn’t alone. I had worked with a task force on some of those homicides in Jeff Davis Parish. Eight young women, all of them poor, all of them involved with drugs and prostitution, were found with their throats cut, or so badly decomposed in a swamp that the cause of death couldn’t be determined. At the same time, there was a series of kidnappings and murders in East and West Baton Rouge parishes. Those victims were also dumped in wetlands areas. We thought we had the killers. In fact, Clete and I helped take them off the board.

  We were wrong. The murders in Jeff Davis Parish came out of a culture that many Americans would not be able to understand, an aggregate of corrupt cops, ignorance, greed, misogyny, cruelty, sexual degradation, drug addiction, and ultimately, collective indifference toward the fate of people who have neither power nor voice. I’m talking about a new social class, one that is not racially defined. They come out of the womb addicted to crack and booze, have only a semblance of a family, drift from town to town selling themselves or dealing dope or stealing to buy it. The irony is they’re not criminals, not in the traditional sense. They’re pitiful, sad, and vulnerable, gathered up in bus stations like grunion at high tide.

  “Have you eaten?” I said.

  “My stomach’s not right,” Clete said.

  “Come inside.”

  “Dave?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you back on the sauce?”

  “I have some potato salad and cold chicken inside.”

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said.

  I walked ahead of him into the kitchen and clicked on the light. I thought I saw a raccoon on the window ledge, staring through the screen. When I looked outside, the yard was empty and windswept, tormented by shadows.

  * * *

  EARLY THE NEXT morning I got a call I didn’t expect.

  “Is that you, Robicheaux?”

  “Who’s calling?” I said.

  “How many people got pustules in their throat and sound like a rusty sewer pipe?”

  “Tony?”

  “Tell the maid to give you a blow job.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “It cost me a dollar ninety-five on the Internet. I think I got fucked. Speaking of which, you put a posthole digger up my ass.”

  “In what way?”

  “Jimmy Nightingale said he was gonna get that Civil War sword appraised. Now he tells me he gave it to Levon Broussard, but he’ll give me ten thousand reimbursement. I told him to change his ten grand into nickels and shove them up his nose. Why’d you do this to me?”

  “Do what?”

  “Introduce Nightingale to this writer.”

  “What do you care?” I said.

  “I’m on third base. I want to produce one of the guy’s books. I’m talking about cable. That’s where they’re making real art and not this computerized stuff.”

  I couldn’t believe I was having a conversation about art with a man who had chopped up an enemy, freeze-dried the parts, and hung
them from a wood-bladed ceiling fan in a family grocery on Magazine.

  “I don’t know anything about that, Tony. I went to dinner with Jimmy and the Broussards. I also left the dinner.”

  “I treated you decent. You stabbed me in the back.”

  “Fire your psychiatrist. He’s not helping you.”

  “I should have known better,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “You’re a juicer, the kind that don’t ever get cured. You got no honor.”

  “I’m going to hang up now. Don’t call here again.”

  “Like I want to,” he replied.

  * * *

  I WALKED TO work. It had rained during the night, and the sky had cleared and the sun had come up bright and hot, and the lawns of the antebellum and Victorian homes along East Main were sprinkled with the pink and red petals of the azalea bushes that bloomed all over Louisiana in the early spring. I passed the grotto and the statue of Jesus’ mother next to the library, and walked down the long oak-shaded drive to the huge brick building on the bayou where I made my livelihood. I poured a cup of coffee and went to Helen Soileau’s office. The door was open. I tapped on the jamb just the same.

  “What’s shaking, bwana?” she said from behind her desk.

  “Can I close the door?”

  She nodded, her face somber, as it always was in enclosed or personal situations. I pulled up a chair. She waited for me to speak.

  “Did you ever hear anything about Jimmy Nightingale having ties to dope or prostitution? Around Jeff Davis Parish in particular?”

  “No. In fact, that sounds ridiculous.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “Where’d you hear this?”

  “Clete got it from a pimp named Kevin Penny.”

  “Great source.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Then why are you asking me?”

  “It bothered me. I just introduced Jimmy to Levon Broussard and his wife.”

  She picked up her ballpoint and flipped it into the air and let it bounce on her ink blotter. “Why do you get mixed up with these people, Dave?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I’ll answer it for you. Both you and Clete hate the rich but pretend you don’t.”

  “Next time I try to come in your office, don’t let me in.”

  “Okay, maybe that’s unfair. But maybe your deeper motivation is even worse.”

  I got up to go.

  “You want to believe people are better than they are,” she said.

  “Send me a bill for that, will you?”

  “Bwana go now. Bwana also shut mouth.”

  Nobody put the slide or the glide on Helen Soileau.

  * * *

  I’D LIKE TO be humble and say Helen read both Clete and me correctly. To a degree, I guess she did. But there was a larger issue at work. You cannot watch the exhumation of a murdered woman from a bog and ever be quite the same. The degradation by the elements of an unpreserved human body is not a kind one. The earth, the primeval soup, if you will, is tenacious; it clings to the skin, peels it from the arms and face, the hair from the scalp. The eyes remain sunken, sometimes looking at you oddly, like chipped marbles pushed into dough by an insensitive thumb.

  The eight women who were killed had no advocate. The cops assigned to the case early on were pitiful if not complicit. Any cop who is honest will tell you there are police officers in our midst who never should have been given power over others. Misogamy is a big part of their makeup. Sexual perversity as well. I’ve known both male and female vice cops who have the psychological makeup of degenerates and closet sadists. I’ve also known gunbulls who would have had no problem working in Dachau. That we protect them is beyond my comprehension. The hundreds of cops and firemen who went into the Towers on 9/11 knew they probably would not come out. What are the limits of human courage? The cops and firemen who walked into stairwells that were not stairwells but chimneys filled with flame and smoke, proved that the human spirit is unconquerable, and it is these men and women who define what is best in us.

  The eight women who were murdered and dumped like bags of trash in a swamp probably never would find justice. The thought that Jimmy Nightingale was involved in the subculture responsible for their deaths gave me no rest. Plus, I had introduced him in good faith to Levon and Rowena Broussard.

  I called him at his home. The same curt secretary answered.

  “This is Detective Robicheaux,” I said. “Is Mr. Nightingale there?”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “Can you tell me where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s flying right now.”

  “Flying where?’ ”

  “I wouldn’t know. He’s flying his plane. Can I assist you with something?”

  “I wanted to ask him about charm schools. Do you have contact with any?”

  “I’ll certainly pass on the information.”

  “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Emmeline Nightingale. I’m his cousin.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, if only over the phone.”

  “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  Franklin was a short drive down the bayou. I checked out a cruiser, turned on the flasher, and headed down Old Spanish Trail into the past, into the fury and mire of bloodline complexities our ancestors tried to wall up with brick and plaster and mortar, hoping the earth would subsume and cover forever the sins they could not.

  * * *

  JIMMY’S FATHER HAD been known as a hunter of big game in Africa, an archaeologist and mining engineer, a linguist, and a world-traveling swordsman who may have been killed by a British parliamentarian he cuckolded. The mother came from the North and was disdainful and private and, in all probability, very unhappy and consequently very angry. She broke her neck in a steeplechase when Jimmy was fifteen.

  I followed Jimmy’s driveway through a tunnel of oaks and parked in front of the columned porch on the house. I stepped out on the gravel and looked at the enormity of the house, the immaculate creamy quality of the paint, the wraparound second-story veranda that Southern belles had probably stood on in their finery and watched the boys in tattered butternut march down a long dusty road to defeat and privation or a Yankee prison. I heard the sound of a single-engine plane that had started to sputter, as though out of gas. The plane, one with pontoons, was a dull red and drifted like a leaf out of a deep blue cloudless sky. It touched down on the bayou’s surface at the same moment the propeller locked in a stationary position. Jimmy opened the cabin door and threw a small anchor attached to a rope over his dock, pulled the rope until it snugged tight, then brought the plane hand over hand into the shallows. He stepped up onto the dock as though alighting from a pleasure boat.

  I walked down the slope, the wind cool, wimpling the water. His egg-shaped face was ruddy, his eyes bright, every hair on his head perfectly in place. “Has a crime wave hit Franklin?” he said.

  “You tell me.”

  “Why you’d leave my table at Clementine’s?

  “I didn’t like the way things were going.”

  “You mean Rowena’s wandering eye?”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “She’s a young woman. What’s the harm?”

  “Her husband might have an opinion.”

  “Dave, you’re a Puritan, and you know it. Come inside.”

  “Do you know a lowlife by the name of Kevin Penny?”

  “A lowlife? Let me see. Nope. Who is he?”

  “A pimp and a meth dealer. He says he’s delivered dope and women to your house.”

  “Grand. Anything else?”

  “He says he makes deposits in a bank account used by your company. He operates around the Jennings area.”

  “Let’s go inside. I have some aspirin in the kitchen. How about a cold washcloth on the forehead?”

  “None of this is true?”

  He walked ahe
ad of me, looking over his shoulder. “It’s good I like you.”

  “I don’t think you get it, Jimmy. This isn’t a courtesy call.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a visitation by a lunatic.”

  I caught up with him and slipped my hand under his arm. I turned him around. He seemed surprised.

  “Lose the attitude, Jimmy,” I said.

  He looked down at my hand. “All right, I will. My attitude is one of kindness to you. I respect your service to the country and your service to the community. You’ve been through perfect misery in the last two years. That isn’t lost on me or others. Learn who your bloody friends are, Dave.”

  “Been hanging with the Aussies?”

  “That’s a cheap shot.”

  “Tony Nemo says you shafted him.”

  “Tony has a fried egg for a brain.”

  “I think Levon Broussard is a decent and honorable man,” I said. “I also think he’s naive. Nobody is going to use me to hurt him.”

  Jimmy put his hands on his hips and looked at the bayou, his face cool and handsome and at peace. “I don’t know what to say. Come have a cold drink with me. Please.”

  “This guy Penny is lying?”

  “Regarding me, he is. I never heard of the guy.”

  I looked him in the face.

  “As God is my witness,” he added.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “I accept your word.”

  “There you go,” he said, and hit me on the back.

  We walked up the slope into his backyard, past a gazebo and camellia bushes in full bloom and trellises dripping with roses and wisteria, the St. Augustine grass so thick and dark green and cold and stiff in the shade that it looked and felt like artificial turf.

  A woman opened the back door. She wore a black suit and hose; her hair was black, too, pulled straight back, her skin the color of paste, her eyes dark and luminous, as though she had a fever. “I’m Emmeline.”

  “How do you do, Miss Emmeline? I’m Dave Robicheaux.”

  “Did you have engine trouble again?” she said to Jimmy.

  “Wasn’t watching the fuel gauge, I’m afraid. Nothing to be worried about. With pontoons, you can land almost anywhere in Louisiana. What did our local congressman say? ‘Half the state is underwater, the other half under indictment.’ ”

  “Would you like a highball or a glass of wine, Detective Robicheaux?”