Robicheaux

by James Lee Burke

  Tony stuck his finger in one ear and wiped it on the tablecloth. “You followed me in here?”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” I said. “How’s it going, Bobby?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “The Advocate says Jimmy Nightingale is trying to distance himself from you,” I said. “I think you’re getting a dirty deal.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Clete said. He hit Earl hard between the shoulders, slanting his wig.

  I caught the waiter’s attention and ordered iced tea and a dozen raw oysters. Clete ordered a po’boy sandwich and a vodka Collins. A black busboy filled our water glasses and took away an empty bread basket and brought back a full one. Tony called the manager over. “That colored kid don’t come close to this table again unless he’s got white gloves on, clear?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Nemo,” the manager said, bending stiffly.

  “What are you looking at?” Tony said to me.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  He waited for me to go on, but I didn’t.

  “You being cute?” he asked. “A play on words or something?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  Clete ordered a second vodka Collins.

  “If this has something to do with Bobby, I want you two guys to lay off him,” Tony said.

  I saw Earl’s face color, his pale blue eyes looking straight ahead.

  “What are you guys here for?” Tony said. “Don’t you talk shit to me, either.”

  Clete took a long drink from his glass. “We were passing by and happened to see you, and thought you could help us with something. See, there’s this ex-con named Kevin Penny, and there’s speculation that somebody might have sicced him on Dave for messing up a movie deal with Levon Broussard. You got some movie deals hanging, Tony? I hear your films are great.”

  Tony’s eyes seem to cross as he tried to ingest Clete’s words. In the meantime, Bobby Earl seemed to be going through an internal meltdown while he picked through the way Tony had marginalized him. He sipped from his water glass and blotted his lips with his napkin. “I’m not the same person I was when I went to prison. I belong to an evangelical reading group now. I’m trying to make amends for my past life. I think, of all people, you would understand that, Dave. May I call you Dave? You treated me harshly once. But I forgave you. Can you do the same?”

  Clete drained his Collins. The waiter began putting our food on the table. “Hit me again on this, will you?” Clete said, pointing to his glass. He looked at Earl. “You walk the walk, Bobby. Fucking A.”

  People at other tables turned in their chairs.

  “Are you mocking me?” Earl said.

  “Are you kidding? I always thought Jimmy Nightingale was a fraud and a four-flusher. Look how he treated Tony. He takes the Civil War sword Tony bought to give to Levon Broussard and gives it to Broussard himself. Now he’s got a rape beef coming down on his head, and he’ll probably give up anybody he can to save his own sorry ass.”

  “What rape beef?” Tony said.

  “A well-known lady has brought charges. You can check out the particulars yourself. This guy Penny says Nightingale has got a cut of the action in Jeff Davis Parish. Maybe elsewhere as well. Now that he’s in trouble, maybe he’ll give up some names. The guy’s NCAA, no class at all.”

  Tony made a wet sucking sound in his throat. “You think you’re smart?”

  “I was keeping you up-to-date on your boy Nightingale, Tony,” Clete said. “I got to hit the head. Don’t choke on that oyster.”

  “Take this thought with you, smart guy. I bought a bunch of your markers, twenty cents on the dollar. Now you owe me, not the shylock.”

  Clete stared at him in disbelief.

  “Yeah, you heard right,” Tony said. “Now go piss.”

  My cell phone rang. It was Helen, but the connection was bad. I went outside on the sidewalk. The air was cool and dank in the shade, and had a winey smell like old Europe. A garbage truck clattered past. “Helen?” I said.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “In the Quarter, eating lunch with Fat Tony and Bobby Earl.”

  “What’s Earl doing there?”

  “Cadging favors.”

  “You need to get back here.”

  “What happened?” I said. My head was still pounding with the revelation that a man like Tony the Nose had bought part of Clete’s debt.

  “Rowena Broussard cut her wrists. She’s at Iberia General. She says nobody believes her account of the assault. She’s putting it on you and me. Levon is yelling his head off.”

  “About what?”

  “He thinks Iberia General isn’t up to his standards. He wants his wife transferred to Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge.”

  “I’ll wrap things up here and head back.”

  “What’s going on with Tony Nemo?”

  “Trouble.” I looked through the restaurant window. Clete was gone from the table. So were JuJu and Maximo. “I’ll call you back,” I said.

  * * *

  CLETE WAS STANDING at the urinal when he heard Maximo and JuJu come through the door. A man wearing a suit was urinating next to him. The man zipped his pants and began combing his hair in the mirror.

  “Go outside, man,” Maximo said.

  “Why?” the man said.

  “We got to unstop a pipe. You need to be somewhere else.”

  The man took one look at the expression on Maximo’s face and went out the door.

  Clete turned on the faucet and watched Maximo and JuJu in the mirror. “Don’t do this.”

  “You got to come out in the alley,” JuJu said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Tony says we gotta talk,” Maximo said.

  “Tell him to boogie, Max,” Clete said. “In six months the state of Louisiana will be installing a pay toilet on Tony’s grave.”

  “What happens later don’t change nozzing now,” Maximo said. “What you got in your coat pocket?”

  Clete squeaked off the faucet and jerked two brown paper towels from the dispenser and dried his hands. “Talk to him, JuJu.”

  JuJu looked like someone had fitted a garrote around his neck. “I got my job to do, Purcel.”

  “Bad choice of words,” Clete said.

  “No, bad choice of everything for you, man,” Maximo said.

  Clete put a hand into his coat pocket for his blackjack, one that was shaped like a darning sock and weighted with lead and attached to a spring and a wood grip. But Maximo had already clicked on the stun gun he held behind his back. He touched it to Clete’s spine, and more than fifteen thousand volts flowed into Clete’s body.

  Clete felt a pain like a bucket of nails tearing their way through his insides, dropping into his genitals, buckling his knees, and making him speak in a voice he didn’t recognize. He pulled himself half erect and tried to swing the blackjack at Maximo’s head. It flew from his fingers into the toilet stall. Clete stumbled along the wall, knocking over the trash can, his eyes bloodshot and stinging.

  “We ain’t finished, man,” Maximo said. “It don’t do no good to run.”

  Clete felt the sharp edges of a condom machine. He fitted his fingers around it and tore it loose in a cloud of plaster and smashed it on Maximo’s head. JuJu was reaching inside his coat for a small five-shot titanium Colt .38 special he carried in a nylon holster under his coat. Clete drove the condom machine like a cinder block straight into his face.

  Maximo lay half upright against the wall. JuJu was bent over the sink, teeth and blood and saliva stringing into his cupped hand. Clete wet a handful of paper towels and pressed them to JuJu’s mouth. “Jesus Christ, JuJu! Why’d you guys do this? What’s the matter with y’all?”

  JuJu spat a tooth into the sink, unable to answer. The door swung back on its hinges. Fat Tony stood in the hallway, one hand propped on his cylinder cart, his lungs wheezing. Two uniformed cops stood behind him. “I got your balls in a vise, Purcel. Your new home is Shitsville. How’s it feel, Bl
impo?”

  MAXIMO AND JUJU went to the hospital, and Clete went to the can. I called Helen and told her I’d be late getting back to New Iberia.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  I told her. In detail.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “New Orleans does that to you.”

  She hung up.

  In the morning I went to Iberia General to visit Rowena Broussard, less out of concern for her than the fact that she had blamed her attempted suicide on Helen and me.

  She was out of intensive care and propped up on the bed in a sunny room that gave onto Bayou Teche and live oaks strung with Spanish moss. Her lips were gray, her face pale, her wrists heavily bandaged. A glass of ice water sat on the table next to her. Water had been spilled on the table.

  “Levon just left,” she said.

  “I came to see you,” I said.

  “I forgot. It’s a felony to commit suicide in Louisiana.”

  “How about losing the victim routine?”

  “You’re a hard-nosed wanker, aren’t you.”

  I sat in a chair next to her bed and picked up her water glass. I held the straw to her mouth. She drank from it and laid her head back on the pillow.

  “What’s a wanker?” I said.

  “A fucking Seppo who doesn’t know where to plant his bishop.”

  I thought it better not to pursue any more Australian definitions.

  “I heard you put your suicide attempt on Sheriff Soileau and me,” I said.

  “You’re right. That’s probably not fair. There was nothing good on the telly, so I thought I’d shuffle off to the crematorium.”

  “Were you ever treated for depression?”

  “Leave the psychoanalysis at the door, if you would.”

  “I’ve had a long relationship with depression, Rowena. It eats at you in ways you can’t describe to others.”

  “That’s why you’re a juicer?”

  “I’m a juicer because I chose to be one.”

  Her eyes held on mine, perhaps with curiosity. Or disdain. I had no idea who she was. I went to the window and gazed down at the bayou. “A Union flotilla came down the Teche in 1863. Twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched right past the site of this hospital. They raped slave women and set fire to plantation homes up and down the bayou. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ ”

  “Tell me there’s a drop of sense in that, because it sounds like drivel.”

  “I think Jefferson was saying that justice eventually comes about but often in an imperfect way. I’m saying I don’t know if you’ll get the justice you deserve.”

  “You’re going to let him get away with this?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Maybe there’re others he’s attacked.”

  “That’s not his reputation.”

  Wrong words.

  “I’m the exception? Just out of nowhere he turns into a rapist?”

  “At least that we know about.”

  “That’s a grand explanation. You’re not responsible for information you’re too lazy to find out about. Lovely.”

  “Jimmy Nightingale has no history of abusing women. His problem is ambition and besting his father.”

  “Who, I understand, was a walking penis. This gets better all the time. Would you please get the fuck out?”

  I left without saying good-bye. I couldn’t blame her for her anger, but I wasn’t sympathetic with it, either. She seemed to nurse it as a friend at the expense of others. I believed Rowena Broussard might take up residence in a black box for the rest of her life.

  Out in the corridor, I heard the elevator door open, then found myself looking at the last person I expected to see at Iberia General that particular day. He looked fresh and radiant, as though he had just wakened from a good night’s sleep and was ready to start a new day. A bouquet of flowers in an electric-blue vase was cradled in his arms.

  “Are you going where I think you’re going?” I said.

  “I couldn’t find anybody to bring the flowers up, so I brought them myself,” Jimmy Nightingale said. “Will you take them the rest of the way?”

  “I just got eighty-sixed. I wouldn’t advise going in there.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “What do you expect?” I said.

  “She knows what happened or, rather, what didn’t happen. I think she’s a bit of a thespian. Is Levon here?”

  “No!”

  “I’ll toggle in and toggle back out.”

  “Leave her alone, Jimmy.”

  “Sorry.” He started to walk around me.

  “I’m speaking to you as an officer of the law. You’re not going into that room.”

  “You’re showing poor form, Dave.”

  “If you go in there, you’re going to be under arrest.”

  “Then you’d better get your handcuffs out.”

  The elevator door opened again. Levon Broussard stepped into the corridor. He remained motionless, staring at us, his lanky frame backlit by a window. His face was as empty as a bread pan. He walked toward us, his eyes never leaving my face, completely ignoring Nightingale. “Why is this lizard standing in front of my wife’s hospital room?”

  * * *

  PEOPLE ARE WHAT they do, not what they think, not what they say. But I think we all have moments when we realize we never quite know a person in his or her totality.

  “I brought your wife flowers,” Nightingale said. “I’d appreciate your not referring to me in a derogatory way.”

  Levon didn’t take his eyes off me. “Get him out of here, Dave.”

  “Everything is under control here,” I said, raising my hand.

  “Only a psychopath would do something like this,” Levon said.

  “Give us a minute here,” I said.

  “No, I will not,” Levon said.

  “You don’t know how much I admire your novels and your wife’s art,” Nightingale said. “Drunk or sober, I would never do either of you harm. For God’s sake, use reason, man.”

  Levon watched a black custodian drag a wheeled bucket of soapy water down the corridor. Then he looked at Nightingale and the electric-blue vase and the roses inside it. “Thank you, sir. I’ll take care of those.”

  His fingers were and long and tapered, like a pianist’s or a basketball player’s. He took the vase from Nightingale and walked to the elevator and pushed the button. When the doors opened, he lobbed the vase inside and watched the doors close again. He walked past us to the custodian and handed him a crisp fifty-dollar bill. “I had an accident in the elevator,” he said. “Sorry to make trouble for you.”

  “It’s all right, suh,” the black man said.

  Then Levon turned around and walked calmly toward Nightingale and me.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “Woe unto thyself,” he replied.

  He grabbed Nightingale by the lapels and crashed him into the wall, pinning him against it, staring straight into his eyes. Then he gathered all the spittle in his mouth and spat it in Nightingale’s face.

  I placed my hand on Levon’s arm. “That’s enough.”

  He released Nightingale and stepped backward. I moved between him and Nightingale. “Let’s go, Jimmy.”

  Nightingale wiped his face on his sleeve. His skin was discolored, as though it had been freeze-burned; his eyes were full of tears.

  “Did you hear me?” I said. “I’ll walk with you to your car.”

  “Yes, let’s do that,” he replied.

  I rested my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll take the stairs.”

  “That would be fine.” He started to look back.

  “Step along now,” I said.

  “It’s funny how things can go amiss, isn’t it? A wrong word here, a misunderstanding there. I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over this.”

  “Let it slide, Jimmy.”

  “There’s nothing like mora
lizing at the expense of another, is there? I must learn the art of it.”

  I accompanied him to his car and then went back to the office.

  * * *

  CLETE CALLED JUST before noon. Maximo and JuJu hadn’t filed charges. Clete had paid a fine at guilty court and was back on the street. “I’ll be in New Iberia this afternoon.”

  “Did Tony Nemo actually buy your markers?”

  “If he did, he screwed himself. I already paid them off.”

  “I don’t think Fat Tony will see it that way.”

  “He’s one step away from worm food and knows it. You know what I think? Every one of these bastards is scared shitless of dying.”

  The gospel according to Cletus Purcel.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING BROUGHT rain and an ink-wash sky and the throbbing of hundreds of frogs. The air was sweet and cold, and I put on a jacket and opened a can of sardines and poured the juice on top of Tripod’s old hutch and set the can inside, next to a bowl of water, careful not to get the smell on my hands or clothes. Then I sat in a big wooden deck chair outfitted with water-resistant cushions and watched the light go out of the sky and the shadows disappear from the bayou’s surface and the alligator gars rolling like serpents on the edge of the lily pads.

  The house was dark except for Alafair’s bedroom, where she was working on her film adaptation of Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel. Boys who had been playing softball in the park had left for the evening, and one by one the floodlamps above the diamond clicked off. I felt my eyes closing and a great fatigue seeping through my body, one that I did not argue with, in the same way that, at a certain age, you do not argue with the pull of the earth. In my dream, I saw the boys in tattered gray and butternut brown marching through the trees in the park, a sergeant with a kepi canted on his brow high-stepping and counting cadence. I walked along beside them and spoke to them in both English and French, once again expecting them to pass by without acknowledging me. But this time was different. They were gesturing, waving me into their ranks.

  Now? I said.

  What better time? the sergeant said. His cheeks were spiked with blond whiskers, his uniform sun-faded and stiff with salt, white light radiating from a hole in his chest.

  I have a daughter who needs me.