Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  “Sorry.”

  “How much you want?”

  “Talk to Levon.”

  “He won’t talk! That’s why I’m here!” He began coughing and spat a wad of phlegm between his legs. He wiped his mouth with a lavender monogrammed handkerchief. His face was dilated, his eyes as big as oysters. “I’m gonna have a heart attack here.”

  “Levon doesn’t think Civil War adaptations have a future.”

  “He’s a snob, and sour grapes is what he is,” Tony said. “I ain’t a bad man, no matter what everybody says. I didn’t invent the rules. I go by the rules. I’m a ruthless son of a bitch who always keeps his word. You could do worse in this business.”

  He began choking again, the handkerchief pressed to his mouth, his face turning purple. His driver spread his gloved hand on Nemo’s back.

  “You better take him to Iberia General,” Alafair said.

  Tony waved weakly at the air. “I want you on that script. You’ve got balls.”

  “I’ve got what?”

  “Balls. You got balls,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

  She wondered how so many people could be afraid of such a sick man. The driver held an oxygen cup to Tony’s face.

  “I hope you’re better, Mr. Nemo,” Alafair said.

  Then she jogged across the green toward the drawbridge at Burke Street, her tanned legs flashing in the sunlight.

  SHE DIDN’T TELL me about her encounter with Tony until that evening.

  “Why didn’t you say anything earlier, Alf?” I said.

  “You were at work. He’s a pitiful man. I think we should feel sorry for him.”

  “Don’t tell Clete Purcel that.”

  “You should have seen him.”

  “Tony Nemo should have been sent to a rendering plant a long time ago.”

  “Pretty callous, Dave.”

  “I’ll feel as bad about that as I can.”

  But you can’t get mad at your daughter because she’s compassionate, even if you think her feelings are misdirected. I called Levon’s house. Rowena answered.

  “Could I speak to Levon, please?” I said.

  “What for?”

  “It’s of a personal nature.”

  “How’s this for personal: Why don’t you do your job and leave us alone?”

  “Where is he, Ms. Broussard?”

  “He just went out the door. With his favorite shotgun. Maybe you can catch him.”

  When I got to the Broussard home, I heard the popping sounds of gunfire from behind the house. It was twilight, the yard deep in shadow, the sky marbled with purple and red clouds. I skirted the house and came out in the backyard. Levon was firing with a twelve-gauge at clay pigeons he launched from an automatic trap thrower, bursting them above Bayou Teche, regardless of the neighbors on the far side of the water.

  He took the plugs out of his ears. He was wearing a sleeveless shooting jacket stuffed with shells. His face seemed thinner, his eyes receded, the color of buckshot. “Slumming?” he asked.

  “I need a lesson or two about film rights and such. Tony Nemo is on Alafair’s case.”

  “About what?”

  “He wants her to write a screenplay or adaptation or whatever you call it based on your novel.”

  “I’ve heard from my agent and a couple of producers this character has been pestering. Evidently, you stoked him up.”

  “I told him he could create a historical piece that wasn’t dependent on your novel.”

  “Thanks a lot for doing that,” Levon said.

  “He says these guys in Hollywood actually want to go into business with him.”

  “They probably do. Nemo is wired in to the entirety of the casino culture. He knows how to get around the unions. He launders money. Hollywood is Babylon by the Sea. He’s a perfect fit.”

  “According to Alafair, period pieces are dead on arrival.”

  “Now they are.”

  “But someday?”

  “What do I know? I don’t care, either.”

  “What writer wouldn’t want to see his work on the screen?” I said.

  “J. D. Salinger.”

  “Salinger didn’t like to see people, either. That’s why he put his name on his mailbox, out on the road.”

  “You want to shoot?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He ejected the spent shell from the chamber and began thumbing five fresh rounds into the magazine.

  “You don’t keep a sportsman plug in the magazine?” I said.

  “I don’t have to. I don’t hunt. I shoot only clay targets.” He rested the shotgun in the crook of his arm.

  “You don’t look the same,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Everything copacetic?”

  “I’m not the issue. Rowena is.”

  “I’m sorry all this has happened to you, Levon.”

  “Actually, I’m surprised you’re here. You must not have seen the local news this evening,” he said. “You were the lead story. I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.”

  * * *

  AT TEN P.M. Alafair and I watched the replay of the interview with T. J. Dartez’s wife. It was hard. Her grief and incomprehension were real. All of her features were round, without corners or angles, her face without makeup, a pie plate full of dough. Her husband was dead, killed, she said, by someone in the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, a man who had harassed both her and her husband. She had no income and was about to be evicted from the Quarters outside Loreauville.

  Alafair started to turn off the set.

  “Let’s hear her out,” I said.

  Mrs. Dartez was crying, her handkerchief twisted between her fingers. The interview had been prefaced with the caption “Justice Denied?” The newsman was obviously moved and had trouble completing the interview. He thanked her for being there, then looked silently at the camera.

  “Someone is doing a job on you, Dave,” Alafair said.

  “Nobody has that kind of beef against me.”

  “Labiche does.”

  “He’s not that smart.”

  “At this point you should get a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer will tell me to shut up and not cooperate with the department. Everything I do will be interpreted as an indicator of guilt.”

  She couldn’t argue with that one.

  I had been in the midst of Katrina and its aftermath. Oddly, I wanted to return to those days. There is a purity in catastrophe. We see firsthand the nature of both human courage and human frailty, the destructive and arbitrary power of the elements, the breakdown of social restraint and our mechanical inventions and the release of the savage that hides in the collective unconscious. An emergency room lit only by flashlights and filled with the moans of the dying and feet sloshing in water becomes a medieval scene no different than one penned by Victor Hugo. It is under these circumstances that we discover who we are, for good or bad. And when all this passes, we never talk about it, lest we lose the insight it gave us.

  Wars have the same attraction. Rhetoric fades away; truth remains. In my hometown, I was trapped by shadows that had neither substance nor face.

  Helen called me in the next morning. “I just got back from the prosecutor’s office.”

  “He watched the news last night?” I said.

  “The wire services and networks are on him. I’ve had three calls myself.”

  “I see.”

  “Internal Affairs is taking over.”

  “Internal Affairs is a joke,” I said.

  “Let me put you on the desk. All this will pass.”

  “Not for me it won’t. Maybe I killed Dartez. I have dreams I can’t remember. I think he’s in them. I see headlights shining and hear glass breaking. I see blood coming from someone’s mouth.”

  It was obvious that she didn’t want to hear it. “We have a witness who puts Kevin Penny at the scene,” she said. “That’s reasonable doubt. The prosecutor knows this isn’t a prosecutable case.”r />
  “Then why doesn’t he say that?”

  “At some point all of us will. Then a shitload of criticism will come down on our heads, and time will go by, and everybody will forget it.”

  She was dead wrong, but I let it go. “Tony Nemo is in town.”

  “Tony Nine Ball is in New Iberia?”

  “He wants Alafair to do a film adaptation of Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel.”

  “Lucky her.”

  “I went to see Levon about it. He talked about his wife’s suicide attempt and her depression. I expected him to say something about Jimmy Nightingale not being under arrest.”

  “So?”

  “I thought it was kind of funny, that’s all.”

  “If I ever saw an instance of Southern inbreeding, it’s that guy,” she said. “The day Levon Broussard makes sense to you is the day you should have yourself lobotomized.”

  * * *

  CLETE HAD BROUGHT Homer Penny to New Iberia and placed him during the day with a Creole woman in an Acadian cottage on the road to St. Martinville. According to legend, it was built in the late eighteenth century and was the oldest structure in the parish. Each morning she took him to school, and each afternoon he rode the school bus back to the cottage, where Clete picked him up at five. In the meantime, Clete visited Carolyn Ardoin at her home in Jennings and brought her flowers and candy and baskets of fruit and books from the library, his heart emptying out each time he looked at the damage that her assailant or assailants had done to her. He also launched his own investigation into the attack, starting with Pookie the Possum Domingue.

  Clete found him early in the day at an upscale billiard hall in Lafayette, one that had a bar and a mixologist and rows of beautifully maintained tables. Pookie was shooting a game of rotation by himself. He wore an expensive oversize suit and a loud tie and tasseled loafers and a crisp shirt with cuff links. His pointy face shrank when he saw Clete walking toward him.

  “Know who Carolyn Ardoin is?” Clete said.

  “Maybe I heard the name,” Pookie said.

  “Wrong answer. She’s my lady friend. Know what happened to her?”

  Pookie rested the butt of his cue on the floor. He looked at the people drinking and eating at the bar. The free lunch that day was chipped beef poured on crushed beignets. A bowl of it sat on a chair by Pookie’s pool table. It looked like cat puke.

  “Want me to ask you again?” Clete said.

  “There’s a shutdown on information in that area.”

  “Because of Kevin Penny?”

  “Cool it, huh?”

  “Who did him?”

  “I don’t know, Purcel. I don’t want to know.”

  “Who attacked Miss Carolyn?”

  “I warned you about Maximo and JuJu.”

  “Tony sicced them on Miss Carolyn?”

  “I ain’t said that. You don’t get it. It’s the dope, man. That’s what all this is about.”

  “The stuff coming in off I-10?”

  “It comes from everywhere. There’s legal marijuana farms in Puerto Rico now. The meth labs are gonna take a hit. You know the drugs you can buy in any school yard in this state?”

  “I don’t care about that,” Clete said.

  “Nobody does. That’s why guys like Tony the Nose are happy. You might pass that on to the broad in the Jeff Davis Sheriff’s Department, dresses like she’s at the rodeo.”

  “Sherry Picard?” Clete said.

  “Yeah, the one that’s got her nose in the air. Here’s the word: Stay out of Jeff Davis Parish. Don’t mess with any of Tony Squid’s people. People should forget any rumors about Jimmy Nightingale.”

  “Nightingale is a great guy?” Clete said.

  “He slept wit’ some of those dead girls.”

  “One of the Jeff Davis Eight?”

  “I ain’t saying no more.”

  “What if I spread it around that you’ve been shooting off your mouth? I might end up being your only friend, Pookie. Give that some thought.”

  Pookie’s skin turned as gray as a dehydrated lizard’s, his eyes as tiny as seeds. “This ain’t right, no. I always he’ped you out, Purcel.”

  “Then do it now. There’s at least one guy out there who needs to go off the board. Dave Robicheaux saw Penny’s body. The man’s feet were bolted to the floor. The guy who did him took his time, then pushed an electric drill through his eardrum into his brain.”

  Somebody power-broke a tight rack, spilling two or three balls onto the floor. Pookie sat down on a felt-covered bench and picked up his bowl of chipped beef and started spooning it into his mouth as though it were wet confetti. He gagged and spat it back in the bowl. “I cain’t take this. I got to get out of town.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know nothing. That’s the point. Ain’t nobody gonna believe me, either. Nobody got my back.”

  Clete went to the bar and bought two long-necks. He sat down next to Pookie and handed him one. “Guys like us are old-school. Drink up and quit worrying, Pook. We’re not that important to anybody.”

  “T’ink so?”

  “You bet,” Clete said, taking a swig.

  Words he would regret.

  * * *

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, I began gathering my notes and writing my conclusions regarding the sexual assault on the person of Rowena Broussard. In many ways, the difficulty lay in the recalcitrant and illogical and contradictory statements and behavior of the accuser. She had not gone to a hospital; nor had she called the authorities or asked for a rape kit. Instead she had showered and destroyed any chance of the prosecution using the kind of forensic evidence that people have learned about from television shows. She had been impaired when the attack took place, if indeed it took place. A pillowcase had been pulled over her head, intensifying her pain and fear but leaving her descriptions muddled. The bruising on her body could have been caused by a fall outside the lounge where she had gotten drunk with the accused.

  She said she had been raped by two men in Wichita, Kansas, but the prosecutor had dropped the charges for political reasons. It was possible she had transferred her rage at the injustice done her in Kansas to her current situation in New Iberia. It happens. The family physician had indicated that she may have been a neglected wife. “Hell hath no fury,” he had said.

  Jimmy Nightingale was a conundrum as well. He had claimed he never touched Rowena except to pick her up when she fell in the parking lot. Then he had indicated he may have had a consensual experience with her, but he could remember no details. He had said they were both swacked out of their minds on hashish and alcohol, which I believed. Other than that, I knew little more than I did when the investigation began.

  I’ve seen cops write off this kind of situation as he said/she said. That’s the cliché they use. When we see it in print or in an interdepartmental e-mail, it means the woman is about to get it in the neck.

  Why?

  The situation is not equal. The woman has to prove the existence of an act nobody other than the perpetrator was witness to. Perhaps a year will pass before the case goes to trial. In the meantime, she has to give depositions in front of strangers, accept lewd stares in a courthouse hallway, the hidden smirk in the face of a redneck cop, the muffled laughter among a group of males as she walks by. I once heard a Lafayette cop in the bullpen, right by the dispatcher’s cage, tell his colleagues about a man who held a woman down and rubbed his penis all over her body. He thought the story was hilarious.

  In my summation, I said I believed the scratches on Rowena’s hip, the bruise inside her thigh, the bite mark on her shoulder, and the obvious emotional and psychological trauma visited upon her were consistent with her claim—namely, that while she was impaired, she was raped and probably orally sodomized by James Beaufort Nightingale. I also believed she’d showered and hadn’t told her husband about the assault immediately because she was ashamed and felt her drunken state had invited the attack.

  What I couldn’t pu
t in my report was my dismay at Nightingale’s attitude. He was obsessed with guilt for air-bombing the Indians but cavalier about the possibility that he had raped Rowena Broussard in a blackout. Regardless, I did the best I could with the information I had, and I e-mailed it to Helen’s computer. Ten minutes later, she opened my door and leaned inside. “Way to rock, pappy.”

  * * *

  ON TUESDAY, JIMMY was formally charged. With an attorney by his side, he surrendered at the courthouse, and in under two hours, he was fingerprinted and released on twenty-five thousand dollars bail. That evening he gave an interview to three local television stations in his backyard. He was dressed in golf slacks and a polo shirt and seated by a reflecting pool blanketed with floating camellias. His skin was pink in the sunset, his bronze hair freshly barbered, his expression both calm and humble. Just as the interview began, he set aside a book he had been reading, one that looked like a Bible. His diction was perfect, his accent like the recorded voice of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren or Walker Percy. You felt he could recite from the telephone directory and turn it into the Sermon on the Mount.

  “I’m disappointed and disturbed by the conduct of some of our officials,” he said. “I bear them no ill will, but I believe a small group of individuals have acted politically and done a disservice to their constituency. I promise to be as forthcoming as I possibly can. I love the state of Louisiana, and I love its people. I would never lie to them. Not now, not in the past, not in the future. I say this before the throne of God.”

  He gazed at the scarlet reflection of the bayou in the moss-hung boughs of the live oaks, his face as chiseled and noble as Robert E. Lee’s at Appomattox.

  No one could say Jimmy Nightingale didn’t have the touch.

  THE MAN WHO got on the flight from Miami to New Orleans and took a seat next to a huge black woman whose rolls of fat seemed to drip into the aisle wore Bermuda shorts, red tennis shoes, a canary-yellow T-shirt with Mickey Mouse’s face on it, and big, round sunglasses that were as black as welders’ goggles. His skin was the color of powdered milk, his hair like wisps of corn silk on a doll’s head, his smile a slice of watermelon.