Robicheaux

by James Lee Burke

  “The dead guy is by the couch,” the fireman said. “One bullet wound through the back and out the chest. What looks like a double-edged puncture t’rew the throat.”

  “Where’s the woman?” Helen said.

  “In the kitchen,” the fireman said. “Nothing’s been touched or moved.”

  “Good job,” she said. She went into the kitchen and came back out. “Emmeline Nightingale,” she said. “What a mess.”

  “That’s the chauffeur on the floor,” I said. “His name is Swede Jensen. Clete got him a job as an extra in Levon’s movie.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time?”

  I nodded toward the bedroom. “Looks like they were getting it on.”

  I went to the kitchen door. I had latex on; so did Helen. There was no brass on the floor or counters or table. It was impossible to count the number of wounds. Emmeline’s expression was one I had seen before: It was devoid of emotion. The eyes were fixed on nothing. The heart-bursting level of fear and pain, the violent theft of life and soul, the desperate plea that never left the throat would remain unrecorded, written on the wind, in the memory of no one except the killer.

  Helen flipped open her phone and called the dispatcher. “Find Jimmy Nightingale and tell him to call me immediately. Tell his people nothing, and don’t take no from any of them. Out.” She looked at me. “I’ll take care of things here. Go up to the Vidrine place and talk to the little girl who saw the man with the rifle.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “How do you figure this?”

  “I don’t get it at all.”

  “In what way?” she said.

  “If the shooter is Smiley, I don’t see the motivation.”

  “Sex,” she said. “When somebody does a number like that on a woman, it’s sex.”

  I drove to the camp up the road where the little girl was waiting for me with her mother on a screened-in gallery. Their clothes were damp from the mist blowing through the screen.

  “Can we go inside?” I said.

  “Yes, suh, we just didn’t want to miss you,” the mother said. She was overweight and wore a dress and a man’s shirt with cutoff sleeves.

  We went inside the small living room. The owners were gone.

  “What happened to your employer?” I asked.

  “Mr. Vidrine was upset,” the woman replied. “He said this ain’t suppose to be happening down here.”

  I asked the little girl her name, then asked her to describe the man who carried a gun.

  “His mouth was real red,” she said. “His name was Smiley.”

  “What did his rifle look like?”

  “It had a telescope on top and a can on the front.”

  “What’d he say to you?”

  “He told me the story of where flying fish come from. Sharks was always chasing and eating them, then a magic lady under the sea gave them wings so they could pop out of the waves and fly away.”

  “That’s a pretty good story,” I said.

  “It wasn’t him killed them people, huh?” she said.

  “We’re not sure, Loretta. Did Smiley tell you where he was going or where he lives?”

  “No, suh.”

  “What kind of car did he have?”

  “It was blue.”

  I asked about the license and the model, but these were not the kinds of things a child her age would take note of.

  “Maybe the man in the car that passed him might know,” she said.

  “Which man? What car?”

  “It was purple,” she said. “What do you call them kind? The top is like canvas.”

  “A convertible.”

  “I seen Smiley drive up the road in his li’l blue car. The convertible drove down to the point. Then the convertible come back up the road and I didn’t see it no more.”

  “Think hard, Loretta. What did the man in the convertible look like?”

  “I couldn’t see good. It was raining,” she replied. “He was big and had on a li’l hat.”

  I stared at the mist and fog rolling off the bay, the bolts of lightning that flickered like snakes’ tongues in the clouds. What in God’s name are you doing, Clete? I thought.

  “Can we go, suh?” the mother said. “I got to go home and fix supper.”

  “Yes, y’all have been very helpful. Thank you,” I said.

  The girl looked up at me. “I don’t t’ink Smiley would hurt anyone. Would he, suh?”

  I didn’t answer and instead said good night and drove back to the crime scene. The paramedics were trundling the bodies on gurneys to an ambulance. Inside the house, Helen was talking on her cell phone to Jimmy Nightingale. Her face looked old when she hung up.

  “Bad?” I said.

  “He cried. I can never read that guy.”

  “The little girl told me a big guy wearing a small hat and driving a purple convertible passed Smiley on the road. Smiley was headed north, the convertible was headed south.”

  “Clete?” she said.

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You get his butt in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

  * * *

  I LEFT THREE messages for him that night and one the next morning. I went by his office. His secretary said she thought he was in New Orleans.

  “When will he be back?” I said.

  “It’s Friday, Mr. Dave. In New Orleans. He’ll be back when he gets back.”

  The double murder was the headline story in The Daily Iberian. I felt caught in a situation that was endless and had no good ending. The rain was unrelenting. We had gone from drought that had left the swamplands strung with dead vegetation to flooded fields and ditches and front yards and cemeteries in which caskets floated from the crypts. Levon Broussard was transferred to the jail in Jennings, then granted bail a second time. From all accounts, Jimmy Nightingale was devastated. I feared for Clete, because I believed he was becoming not only obsessed but irrational. I went to a noon meeting and passed when it was my turn to speak, primarily because I genuinely believed, as Clete and Helen did, that a shapeless and malevolent entity was in our midst. It was not the kind of stuff that improved a recovering drunk’s day.

  At one-thirty P.M. Saturday, Clete called me at home.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In the Big Sleazy, where else? If you’re worried about Homer, he’s with the lady I hire.”

  “You were seen at the Nightingales’ camp, Clete. Shortly after Smiley did a job on Swede Jensen and Emmeline Nightingale.”

  “So what?”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I wanted to have another run at Jimmy Nightingale. A St. Mary deputy told me he was probably at the camp.”

  “You could end up a suspect.”

  “I was trying to be courteous and return your calls, big mon. How about getting off my case?”

  “Don’t shine me on.”

  “I’m going to bring that lying cocksucker down,” he said. “Maybe I won’t bust a cap on him, but one way or another I’m going to put a freight train up his ass. I mean that literally—in the bridal suite in Angola.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Nail him as a coconspirator in the death of the Jeff Davis Eight. One way or another, I’m going to get him. I’ve had a good life.”

  Then I remembered Jimmy Nightingale had a rally that night at the Superdome.

  “I’ll put you in handcuffs if I have to,” I said.

  He was already off the line.

  * * *

  I HEADED FOR new Orleans in my pickup, the rain twisting out of a gaseous-green sky. Just as I approached the bridge at Des Allemands, my cell phone vibrated on the seat. It was Sherry Picard.

  “Clete left me a message,” she said. “Something about him being sorry for his part in it, and if he didn’t see me again, I was a great woman, blah-blah-blah.”

  “Clete isn’t into blah-blah-blah.”

  “Whatever. He sounded like he was on a banzai mission.
”

  “He says he’s going to take down Jimmy Nightingale,” I said. “In whatever fashion he can. Nightingale has a rally at the Superdome tonight.”

  “Shit,” she said. “Clete’s talking about capping him?”

  “I didn’t say that.” I was atop the bridge now. I could see houseboats anchored at a wooded island, the bayou flowing into a chain of lakes, the rain denting the water. Somehow I knew what was coming, and I didn’t want to hear it.

  “Here’s the gen,” she said. “Remember the fast-food trash by Kevin Penny’s motorcycle shed? I matched the prints. They belong to Rowena Broussard.”

  “I thought she wasn’t in the system.”

  “She visited her husband when he was temporarily locked up. I gave her a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup.”

  “The match might put her at the scene, but not at the time of Penny’s death.”

  “It gets worse, at least from a prosecutor’s perspective. The prints of Herb Smith, a social worker, were at the scene.”

  “I don’t remember the name,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. His niece was one of the Jeff Davis Eight. Starting to get the picture?”

  “You think Rowena did it, but there’s no way she’ll be convicted?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Levon won’t, either, because people around here think he walks on water?”

  “You got it.”

  “What does this have to do with Clete?” I asked.

  “He’s convinced himself Jimmy Nightingale is partly responsible for the Jeff Davis Eight and for Penny’s death and for the attempt to put a bomb in his car. I don’t think Nightingale has anything to do with any of it.”

  “I wouldn’t rule Nightingale out, Miss Sherry. At least not entirely.”

  “Lose the Gone with the Wind stuff, will you? I can’t take that plantation cutesy talk.”

  “You know who else told me that?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Rowena Broussard,” I said.

  “See you at the Dome, hotshot.”

  * * *

  FOR FIVE DAYS in August 2005, the Superdome had been shelter for more than thirty thousand people during and after Hurricane Katrina. Do not let the term “shelter” mislead you. The Dome became an introduction to hell on earth. The storm stripped off huge chunks of the roof; the power and water supply failed; toilets and urinals overflowed and layered the floors with feces. The food in the refrigerators rotted. The heat and humidity and stench caused television reporters to gag on-camera. Every inch of concrete surrounding the Dome was covered with garbage, clothing, and people sweltering under a white sun. Black people who tried to leave the area by crossing the Danziger Bridge were shot by people officers. One of those who died was a mentally disabled man.

  But our excursion into the Garden of Gethsemane had slipped into history, the incompetence and cynicism and villainy of its perpetrators largely unpunished, the bravery and self-sacrifice of its heroes, such as the United States Coast Guard, largely unremembered. Jimmy’s rally was more like Mardi Gras than a political event, even though most of the crowd knew about the murder of his sister. The purple and green columns of light surrounding the Dome were an ode to the ancient world, a pagan display presided over by a rotund and garlanded and sybaritic man who understood his constituency’s love of shared power and empire and blood sports and the opportunity to participate and glory in them.

  I called Clete and went directly to voicemail. Dixieland bands played outside and inside the Dome, the musicians in candy-striped jackets and straw boaters, their smiles frozen like ceramic dolls’. Tens of thousands filled the seats and aisles and corridors. The concession stands were heaped with Cajun and Creole cuisine; draft beer was ten dollars a cup, and a double-shot cocktail was fourteen-fifty. Jimmy Nightingale T-shirts and caps were everywhere. The ammonia smell of urinated beer bloomed from the men’s rooms.

  By the time Jimmy mounted the stage, the crowd had doubled, and the air was filled with an electric haze and a growing feral odor from the press of bodies in the corridors and aisles.

  Jimmy was dressed in mourner’s black. But through the tiny binoculars I carried, I could see a flag pin on his lapel and sequins that had been sprayed on his hand-tooled boots and his gold cuff links that were the size of quarters. His incarnations were endless, like Proteus rising from the sea. In this instance, he vulgarized his own image and yet did it with elegance.

  His short-brim Stetson, one he never wore in Franklin, hung from his hand. His expression was neither somber nor celebratory. He gazed silently at the crowd, bathed in light, his posture and trim physique and resolute manner heartbreaking, considering the loss he had just incurred. All sound and motion in the Dome seemed to slow like a film winding down, then stop. Even the beer vendors in the aisles were motionless, their boxlike trays suspended painfully from their necks.

  “I want to thank you,” Jimmy said, a tremble in his voice. “I cannot express how much I appreciate your being here. You are the finest people I have ever known. God bless each and every one of you.”

  The stage lights were pointed up into his face, giving it the angular splendor of a Byzantine saint. One by one the audience members came to their feet, applauding lightly at first, then breaking into an ovation that shook the building.

  Tears slid down both his cheeks. Then Jimmy did something I never saw coming. He went to the back of the platform and motioned for a man to join him. Even the audience seemed stunned. A gaunt figure whose plastic surgery had failed him was being raised from the dead, a modern Lazarus dragged against his will into the light, all his sins forgiven. Even he did not seem to understand his good fortune. He raised one hand timidly, as though afraid of the response.

  The audience was transfixed and did not know what to do.

  Jimmy lifted a microphone from a stand. “Many of us take different roads in our struggle to keep our country free and pure and unsullied by the millions crossing our borders. Bobby Earl loves his country and the traditions for which our brave fighting men and woman have shed their blood. We help the poor, the immigrant who honors our laws, the destitute and downtrodden, but we do not let others rob us of our heritage and birthright. Bobby Earl devoted his life to an honorable cause, and we will not be party to the political correctness that condemns a man because he speaks his mind and practices the freedoms guaranteed him by the First Amendment.

  “Bobby is a good man, a Christian and a patriot. Let’s give him the credit he deserves, and to hell with the people who don’t like it. I’m proud to call Bobby Earl my friend.”

  One heartbeat later, someone let loose with a Rebel yell, and the entire place went crazy. That was when I saw Clete Purcel standing in a doorway that led to the concourse. He was eating a hot dog, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin as he chewed. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at the caller ID and put the phone to my ear. “This is Dave.”

  “I’m in the Dome,” Sherry Picard said. “Have you found Clete?”

  “I just saw him. He went into the concourse. I’m walking there now. Before you hang up, I have to ask you a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How does a woman the size of Rowena Broussard take down a guy like Penny?”

  “Succinylcholine.”

  “Say again?”

  “It paralyzes the muscles. Somebody shot a hypodermic load of it into his system. Rowena was a nurse in South America, wasn’t she? Those lefties are a howl.”

  “Clete fought for the leftists in El Sal.”

  “I gave him a dispensation.”

  Stay away from this person, I thought.

  CLETE LEFT THE concourse and worked his way to the other side of the Dome, hoping to come up on the backside of the stage. If he could make it that far, he was going to walk onto the stage. It was undignified, self-abasing, and maybe the act of a public fool. What did it matter? He thought of the graves he had dug with an e-tool, the bodies hung in trees after the VC
got finished with them, the people who had sat on scalding rooftops in the Lower Ninth Ward, waiting for the helicopters. This was the kind of world Clete believed Jimmy Nightingale would preside over. The man used people as he would a suppository. Clete wanted to print him on a wall.

  But this was a fantasy, and he knew it. As a boy, Clete had never been a bully, although older and bigger boys had bullied him. He even forgave the kid from the Iberville Project who bashed him with the pipe that left the scar through his eyebrow. The kid had grown up no differently than Clete and later died at Khe Sanh. For Clete, the myth of Wyatt Earp was not a myth. You smoked them when they dealt the play but not before, even if you had to eat a bullet. And for that reason alone, Clete would always be at a disadvantage in dealing with a cunning man like Nightingale, who, minutes earlier, had incorporated the racism of Bobby Earl into his campaign while acting as the bestower of forgiveness.

  Clete passed a restroom and a locked office, then found a door that opened onto a storage area under the stands. He opened a second door onto an entryway from which he could see the backside of Nightingale as he introduced a famous country singer wearing a thick-felt tall-crowned white cowboy hat and a pale blue western-cut suit stitched with flowers.

  Clete also saw a beer vendor whose pants and shirt looked dipped in starch, the trousers stuffed inside rubber boots, a Nightingale baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He was a short, pudgy man with lips like red licorice.

  Clete stared at the vendor but didn’t move. What was he waiting for? He started again toward the aisle, his gaze riveted on the vendor’s neck. Let it play out, a voice said.

  His stomach was churning. Maybe he’s just an ordinary guy, he thought. What if you start something and security gets the wrong idea and the guy gets hurt just so Nightingale is safe?

  But he knew the real reason for his unwillingness to act. The weight on his heart was the size of an anvil.

  “What are you doing here, asshole?” a voice said.

  Clete turned around. Once again he was looking into the face that was one of many he could never rid himself of. The faces were out of a subculture that fed on need and dysfunction and systemic cruelty, in this case the face of an old-time gunbull whose measure of self-worth was the degree to which he could inspire terror in others. He wore tight gray slacks with high pockets and a shirt the color of tin and a bolo tie and a salt-and-pepper mustache as stiff as wire and a belt equipped with Mace, handcuffs, a slapjack, and a blue-black semi-auto with checkered grips.