Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

“I hope I didn’t call too early, Mr. Purcel,” she said.

  “No, ma’am, I was just about to head to the office.”

  “I’m probably not supposed to make this call, but you’re such a nice man, and I know you want to be apprised of Homer’s situation.” She paused as though reluctant to continue. “We’re reinstating him with Mr. Penny today.”

  “At the trailer?”

  “Yes, a little earlier than I expected. But if not now, we would be taking him there later, and the circumstances wouldn’t be any different.”

  “What time today?”

  “At noon sharp.”

  “This troubles me, Miss Carolyn. Mightily.” Why had he used such a strange word?

  “Mr. Purcel?”

  “Yes?”

  The time seemed to drag like a chain down a stairs. “I’m terribly perturbed about this placement,” she said finally.

  “I’m going to drop by the trailer.”

  “I know you’re a good man. But don’t be confrontational with him. You know whom he’ll punish.”

  “I’ll call you later,” he said. “I promise everything will be all right.”

  “No, it won’t. But you’re kind to say that. You’re a good man, sir.”

  He felt a blooming sensation in his chest that he couldn’t explain.

  * * *

  CLETE DROVE TO Lafayette and made a purchase at a sporting goods store, then got on I-10 to Jennings. Homer Penny had no memory of his mother, a meth addict and an attractive black prostitute whom her husband, Kevin, pimped out to middle-class white men from Lake Charles and Lafayette, including a well-known physician. Homer seldom spoke and always looked uncertain or frightened, as though standing in a canoe or pirogue, about to topple into a bayou filled with snakes. He had big ears and blue eyes and pale gold skin with big brown freckles like human camouflage. Clete could never get him to smile.

  Clete pulled up in front of the trailer at 11:45. The dirt bike was gone. At noon a man in a state car came up the track, bouncing in the potholes, the passenger’s head barely visible above the dashboard. The passenger wore horn-rimmed glasses and a hand-folded paper hat, and had big ears and a tiny nose and a thin face and slits for eyes and made Clete think of a baby seabird peeping out of a nest. The driver parked and got out. He wore a dark blue coat that had dandruff on the shoulders. “You Mr. Purcel?”

  Clete climbed out of the Caddy, a shopping bag in his hand. “I am.”

  “I’m Herb Smith. With the state. Miss Carolyn said you’d be here. Looks locked up.”

  “It is.”

  Smith twisted his wrist to read his watch. “Three minutes to noon.” He squeezed his eyes shut and clicked them open again, like the eyelids on a mechanical doll.

  “What?” Clete said.

  “Some days I hope certain people don’t show up.”

  “I brought something for Homer,” Clete said. He opened the sack so Smith could see inside. “You mind?”

  “No, sir, go right ahead.”

  Clete removed an Astros baseball cap and a softball and two gloves. “How about it, pal?” he asked the boy.

  “I never played,” the boy said, his gaze askance.

  “We’re going to change that. You get over there, and I’ll start lobbing them to you. Then you fireball them back.”

  The boy couldn’t catch with a wheelbarrow. He tripped and fell down when he ran after the ball. He couldn’t throw thirty feet.

  “Tell you what,” Clete said. He went back to the Caddy. “I got you a bat. I’ll pitch ’em, you hit ’em.”

  Homer missed the first two pitches, clipped the third, and hit the fourth squarely, ripping it across the grass. The welfare man from the state volunteered as catcher. It was 12:26.

  “Do I have to stay here, Mr. Clete?” the boy said.

  “For a time. Mr. Smith and Miss Carolyn and I will be looking in on you.”

  The boy swung the bat at nothing. At 12:37 they heard the whine of a dirt bike. The boy’s face drained. Clete saw Smith mouth the words “Son of a bitch.”

  Kevin Penny cut the gas feed and coasted up to the Caddy. He had a backpack. He pulled on the neck of his T-shirt and wiped his nose with it. “The big three. Or call it the two and a half.”

  “I need your signature and I’ll be gone,” Smith said.

  “What day of the month does the check come?” Penny said.

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s supposed to be in the agreement. The amount and the date of delivery.”

  “I think you’ll find everything in order,” Smith said.

  “Oh, hell yes,” Penny said. He unslung his pack and walked past his son to the porch, grinding the Astros cap into the boy’s scalp. Penny sat on the top step and opened a can of Bud and began tearing apart a rotisserie chicken from his pack and eating it with his hands. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  Clete pitched the ball to Homer, but the boy let the bat stay on his shoulder and watched the ball drop into the dirt.

  “Strike one,” Penny said.

  Clete took off his fielder’s glove and walked to the porch. He curled the glove into a cone and tucked it between Penny’s thigh and the railing. “There’s Little League ball in Jennings.”

  “Reach me those napkins in my pack, will you?” Penny said.

  Clete didn’t answer. Penny said something with his mouth full of meat.

  “What’s that you say?” Clete asked.

  Penny cleared his throat and laughed. “I thought that perfumed cunt from the welfare office would be here. Instead I get you.”

  “I’ll be running along now.”

  “Want a thigh?” Penny raised the chicken and the grease-pooled foil to Clete’s face.

  Clete walked to the Caddy, a sound in his ears like tank treads clanking or the mewing of barnyard animals caught inside an unbearable flame. He bent down to Homer. “I’ll be back to see you, pal. I’m on your side. So are Miss Carolyn and Mr. Smith.”

  The boy was not listening. His eyes were wide, his bottom lip trembling, as he stared at his father.

  Clete could remember little of driving back to New Iberia. Nor could he remember when he’d had a sadder day or a greater sense of foreboding.

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON HELEN caught me in the corridor. “In my office, Dave.”

  I followed her inside and shut the door.

  “The prosecutor is on my butt about the Dartez investigation,” she said.

  “He doesn’t like how it’s going?”

  “He thinks you should be on the desk.”

  “Remind me of that, come the next election.”

  Helen was silhouetted against the window, her face covered with shadow. I didn’t know if I had made her angry or not.

  “I made a mistake assigning Labiche to the case,” she said. “He wants your job.”

  Finally, I thought.

  “I talked to a couple of people in Dade and Broward Counties. They said he took freebies in Liberty City, but that’s about all they knew of.”

  “Any vice cop who’ll take freebies will take money.”

  “In this instance there’s no evidence of that,” she said.

  “Come on, Helen, if a cop is dirty, he can be blackmailed. He can also be killed.”

  “All right,” she said, giving up.

  She had gone to extraordinary lengths for me many times; I took no pleasure in her concession. “Helen, I think everything we’re talking about is much bigger than Labiche or me or T. J. Dartez or Jimmy Nightingale. I think it has to do with narcotics, with all the trafficking that starts in Florida and comes straight down I-10 into our midst.”

  “The crack trade in Jefferson Davis Parish isn’t the big score, Dave.”

  “We’re the Walmart of the drug culture. Kids deal dope while they line up to go to a movie.”

  Her face was still in shadow. “I don’t think the Dartez homicide is prosecutable, at least not at this point. I’m telling that to the prosecutor and leaving it i
n his hands. Prepare yourself.”

  “For what?”

  “We’ll be accused of covering up. Look at me, Dave.”

  I knew what was coming.

  “Tell me you didn’t do it. Or at least tell me that deep in your heart, you believe you didn’t do it.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Goddamn it,” she said.

  “Don’t swear.”

  She turned her back to me and stared out the window. The wind was blowing in City Park, the boughs of the oak trees swirling, a motorboat towing a water-skier, furrowing the bayou. I wanted to say something of a consoling nature, but I had nothing to offer.

  * * *

  CLETE PURCEL NORMALLY referred to cop shows on television as “the most recent shit Hollywood is foisting on really stupid people.” Clete’s intolerance aside, the facsimile has little to do with the reality. Probably one third of cops are dedicated to the job; one third eat too many doughnuts; and one third are people who should not be given power over others. Female detectives do not show off their cleavage. Many cops carry a drop or a throw-down. Cops plant evidence and lie on the stand. In our midst are sadists and racists who taint the rest of us. And the greatest contributor to solving crimes is not the lab but the informant, usually someone who skipped toilet training and couldn’t make a peanut butter sandwich with a diagram.

  For Clete, at least in the Acadiana area, that man was Pookie the Possum Domingue. Pookie had the eyes and snout of his namesake and walked in the same unsteady, desultory fashion, his head wobbling on his spindle of a neck. Years ago he was a gofer for the Teamsters in Lafayette when they were cheating their own members out of their union books. He also racked balls in Antlers Pool Hall and did scut work for a bail bondsman, shilled for the card dealers in the old Lafayette Underpass area, and washed money with No Duh Dolowitz at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds. But his great talent lay in what he called “research.” Though the Internet had put most PIs out of work, Pookie was unfazed. His knowledge of the netherworld could be matched only by the caretakers of the La Brea Tar Pits.

  He called Clete at his office on Tuesday morning. “Is that you, Purcel?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “You keeping your plunger under control?”

  “All right, wise guy, if this is who I think it is—”

  “Dial it down. I got some information for you. I was in Sticks this afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “Sticks Billiards. In Lafayette. We got a bad connection here?”

  “I know where you live, Pookie. Smart off one more time, and I’m going to stuff you into a hamster cage.”

  “I’m only axing for a little respect here.”

  “I apologize. But I don’t need termites in my building or in my head. Now, what do you want?”

  “I was shooting some eight ball, taking down this blimp with an ass on him like a washtub, when guess which two clowns come through the door and blow my action. To be more specific, guess which two guys announce to everybody in the place, ‘Hey, Pookie, glad to see you’re not eighty-sixed no more. Leave us the bones.’ ”

  “Sorry I missed this world-shaking event,” Clete said.

  “Put the cork in it, Purcel. It was JuJu and Maximo. Both of them look like somebody tried to screw their heads into a fire hydrant.”

  “That breaks me up.”

  “Maybe it should. Because the first thing they ax is if I’ve seen you around. I told them you got an office in New Iberia. So Maximo says, ‘No, that ain’t what we axed. We don’t need nobody to tell us how to use the phone book. We’re axing where that fat shit hangs out. Where’s he get his knob polished, that kind of thing.’ ”

  “Somebody put you up to this?”

  “I’m trying to do a favor here.”

  “The last favor you did was to talk your mother out of committing suicide because she defecated you into the world.”

  There was a pause. “I’ll say this once. JuJu ain’t a bad guy. The tomato picker with him has done eight or nine contract hits. The word is Tony the Nose bought your markers. If that’s true, pay him or find an igloo on the North Pole.”

  “There’re no Eskimos on the North Pole.”

  “You can be the first.”

  The line went dead.

  Clete took his .38 snub from its holster and flipped out the cylinder, rotating it idly with his thumb. What to do? Nothing. Let them come to him. There was nothing like a bullet in the center of the forehead to get your point across.

  His thoughts were self-serving, and he knew it. The guy who blew out your wick was always a nasty little hornet like Maximo, a disposable psychopath who watched Saturday-morning cartoons and had a three-hundred-pound mistress whose lap he sat in for a photograph and then put the photo on the Internet.

  Clete found the business card that Carolyn Ardoin had given him and dialed the cell number on it. “I thought I’d ring and let you know I’ll be checking on Homer as often as I can,” he said.

  “Mr. Smith told me you bought Homer a ball and glove and bat. That was probably one of the best gifts that boy ever had.”

  “I happened to see them on sale.”

  “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, Mr. Purcel.”

  Clete couldn’t remember why he had called. Or maybe he did. It wasn’t easy to talk to normal women. “Is the weather pretty nice over there?”

  “In Jennings?” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s a couple parishes over from us. I wondered if the weather was the same.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s like yours in New Iberia.”

  “It’s a swell day here.”

  “Are you worried about Homer?”

  “I was also wondering, you know, are you a married lady? I mean, I didn’t see you wearing a wedding ring.”

  “You saw correctly. I am not married. I was widowed when I was twenty-three.”

  “I’ve enjoyed our talks and meeting you,” he said. “Three or four times a year I go fishing thereabouts. South of Jennings, I mean.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. Purcel?”

  “I was wondering if you like movies.”

  “I love them,” she said.

  “There’re some good ones playing in Lafayette. There’s a dinner club close by that I’m fond of, too.”

  “I think I know the place.”

  “Miss Carolyn, could I motor on by your home this evening?”

  “I’d like that very much, Mr. Purcel.”

  * * *

  THEOLOGIANS CALL IT the calculated testing of others’ charity. By some it’s considered a serious sin. But for someone who is manipulative or morally insane, it’s not a big obstacle.

  Early that same morning, Alafair entered the grounds of the Shadows-on-the-Teche, an enormous pillared twin-chimney two-story brick home built in 1834, and today a National Trust historic site that tourists file through seven days a week. But for Alafair, the Greek revival splendor and the magnificent oaks and gardens and piked fence and bamboo borders had another meaning. Regardless of the time of year—even in spring, when the petals of the azaleas were scattered on the grass and the sunlight was transfused into a golden-green presence inside the canopy of live oaks—the rooms of the house remained cold and damp, the lichen on the trees and flagstones and birdbaths and even the tombs of the original owners a testimony to the decay and slow absorption of man’s handiwork on the earth. As Alafair sat on a stone bench in the coldness of the shade, she wondered why the glossy brochures at the entrance said nothing about where the slaves were buried, all 164 of them, nameless souls who at best were spared the lash and fed on a daily basis in the same spirit that one feeds chattel.

  The house was occupied by General Nathaniel Banks’s command in 1863 and figured prominently in Levon Broussard’s novel set during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Farther down Main Street stood the Episcopalian church that served as a battalion aid station for Confederate wounded, then was commandeered by
General Banks and the pews pushed together to form troughs for Yankee cavalry. The partial remains of at least two gunboats still lay under the quiet surface of the bayou. The locale was a postcard snipped right out of a history that, for good or bad, you could place your hand on and feel its heart beating.

  Alafair looked up from her notebook and saw a woman in a brocaded white suit and black pumps and an arterial-red necklace walking toward her. She carried a slender box wrapped with satin paper and a purple ribbon.

  “I parked between Porteus Burke’s law office and the Shadows, and was walking to your house and looked through the gate, and there you were,” the woman said.

  “Hello, Emmeline,” Alafair said.

  “May I sit down?”

  “To be honest, I’m working right now.”

  “On the screenplay?”

  “That and a couple of other things.”

  “I’ll take just a minute,” Emmeline said, sitting on the bench. She put the box in Alafair’s lap. “A little chocolate to make up for the tennis ball in your face.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you, but I don’t handle sugar very well.”

  “Oh, Alafair, I do want us to be friends.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Alafair said, returning the box.

  “I understand.” She took a breath and smiled self-consciously. “I need a favor. It’s about Jimmy. He thinks the world of your father.”

  “Is this about the rape?”

  “No, absolutely not. Jimmy bears terrible guilt for an event that happened years ago, one he had little control over. Your father is a war veteran. He’ll understand.”

  “Dave is investigating your cousin for rape.”

  “I don’t believe a rape ever took place. But that’s not why I’m here. You don’t understand Jimmy. He wants to be Levon Broussard. Now, thanks to his wife, Levon hates Jimmy.”

  “What is Dave supposed to do about it?”

  “Did Dave see atrocities in Vietnam?”

  “He doesn’t talk about the war.”

  “Jimmy was in South America at the same time Levon was, except Levon was working for Amnesty International.”

  “I’m lost. I also need to go.”

  “Jimmy is capable of taking his own life.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Levon spat in his face. He might as well have spat on his soul.”