Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  “What’s on Ms. Nightingale’s mind?”

  “She thinks Levon Broussard’s lawyers are going to put the Kevin Penny torture/murder on her brother.”

  “Why would they want to do that?” Clete asked.

  “What do you think? To break his sticks.”

  “So he can’t get elected to the U.S. Senate?”

  “The Senate is just the rosin box,” Swede said. “Jimmy Nightingale is the man for our times.”

  “I knew a mobbed-up guy from Jersey who knew Nightingale in the casino business. He’s doing life for tying a guy to a tree and shooting him in the balls. He said Nightingale was a Murphy artist without the virtues.”

  “Go to one of his rallies. All those people are wrong?”

  Clete looked at Swede again. His eyebrows were irregular in shape, like earthworms that had been stepped on. “You were in the ring?”

  “Ham-and-egg stuff. Nothing to write Ring magazine about.”

  “Where’d you learn to fight?”

  “Inside. When I was eighteen. The Nightingales gave me a break, like they have a lot of people. Here’s the gig. Two thousand a month retainer, probably for a year.”

  “Retainer to do what?”

  “To swat flies. This place is Bum Fuck on acid. You know the kind of dirt that people are trying to dig up on Mr. Nightingale?”

  “Tell Ms. Nightingale to call me.”

  “She’s waiting for you now.”

  “Where?”

  “You got a problem with food from Popeyes?”

  “No.”

  “She’s in the park.”

  Don’t do it, a voice said.

  “I’ll follow you,” Clete said.

  * * *

  HE DROVE HIS Caddy onto the grass by a concrete boat ramp and a row of camellia bushes on the water’s edge. Emmeline was sitting under the roof of a picnic shelter, wearing a sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat with silk flowers sewn on it, like one from the plantation era. She and Swede had spread a checked cloth on the table and placed there a bucket of fried chicken and one of fried crawfish and a box of buttermilk biscuits with a container of milk gravy. Clete removed his porkpie hat and sat down. “How do you do, ma’am?” he said.

  “You’re as big as they say,” she said.

  “My stomach?”

  “A big guy is a big guy,” she said.

  “Swede says you want some help.”

  “I don’t want Jimmy stabbed in the back.”

  “Who wants to do that?”

  “Levon Broussard, the savior of humanity,” she said. She pushed the bucket of fried crawfish toward him.

  “Got a soft drink?” he asked.

  “You don’t want a long-neck?” Swede asked.

  Emmeline’s eyes drilled a hole in Swede.

  “Coca-Cola coming up,” he said.

  “So you want Levon Broussard off your case?” Clete asked Emmeline.

  “Or tied to an anchor and thrown in the Gulf,” she said. “That’s a joke.”

  “I don’t think the guy’s got a lot of arrows in his quiver.”

  “What do you call an abomination like Tony Nemo?” she asked.

  “I don’t like to say this, but Fat Tony poured most of your brother’s concrete.”

  “Nemo poured half the concrete in New Orleans,” she replied.

  Clete took a long sip from his Coke, his eyes veiled. What was she after? Now she was talking about oil companies, their mistreatment of Jimmy, the unfair role they’d placed him in in South America, the stupidity of the media, the hypocrisy of Levon, the vile nature of his wife.

  “How’s Broussard a hypocrite?” Clete asked. “He did a lot of good down in Latin America, didn’t he? With Amnesty International and that kind of stuff.”

  “He can’t write or talk enough about his glorious ancestors, who happened to be slave owners; then he bleeds all over the television screen about the suffering people in Guatemala. In the meantime, his Aborigine wife tells everybody who’ll listen that Jimmy raped her.”

  “She’s an Aborigine?” Clete said.

  “She looks like one.”

  “You’re not going to go jogging with her?” he said.

  “Did I misjudge you?”

  “Do you mean am I dumb instead of smart? Yeah, probably.”

  “That’s not clever, Mr. Purcel. You have a good reputation as a private investigator. But I don’t think you understand how vicious Jimmy’s enemies are. You also don’t know how good a man he is.”

  Right, Clete thought. He took another sip from his Coke. How far should he take it?

  “Swede mentioned a retainer of two grand a month,” he said. “That’s a lot of money for what sounds like doing nothing.”

  “There would be a few duties,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Security, maybe.”

  He picked up a biscuit and dipped it in the gravy and put it into his mouth, his cheek pouching. His eyes remained empty, as though he were detached from the conversation. “Has Dave Robicheaux got anything to do with this?”

  “No. Why would he be involved in anything regarding Jimmy? Actually, I don’t care for Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Don’t take this personal, Ms. Nightingale. When a guy like Tony the Squid can’t get a cop on a pad, he goes to a friend of the cop. Maybe he wines and dines the cop, then lends him money. The issue is information. Any place there’s vice, extortion, blackmail, union corruption, insider trading, jury-rigging, highway contracting, the issue is always information. The rest of it doesn’t mean diddly-squat on a rock. Outside of the scut work I do for bail bondsmen, I make my living off information. I’m not proud of it.”

  “Your perception is correct,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I want to retain you to keep me informed about people who want to hurt my brother,” she said. “Got it?”

  “I don’t do wiretaps, I don’t do videos through windows, and I don’t deliberately mess people up, not even the lowlifes.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” she said.

  “Let me think on it.”

  “You’ve taken up this much of my time, and you’ll think on it?”

  Clete looked at the glare of the sun on the water. It resembled a yellow flame, dancing under the chop from a passing boat. “I’ve got a big enemy. My own head. So I got to think through things before I make choices. Then I usually make the wrong choice anyway. Then I got to think my way back through it a second time, and it’s not only a drag, I get a bad headache.”

  She gazed into space as though she had been listening to someone speaking Sanskrit.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Could I have a couple of these crawfish for the road?” he asked.

  “I can’t believe I’ve had this conversation,” she said.

  * * *

  ONE HOUR LATER, Clete looked out the back window of his office and saw Swede Jensen on his patio, where Clete kept a reclining chair and a spool table outfitted with a beach umbrella. Swede was tossing his chauffeur’s cap into the air and catching it. Clete opened the French doors and stepped out into the heat. “You trying to creep my office?”

  “Ms. Nightingale is picking up her Lexus at the dealership. I got a question. Are you on the inside with the Robicheaux girl?”

  “Time to use your words carefully, Swede.”

  “You got me wrong. You said something about me working in a porn studio. Maybe there was some porn made there, but I wasn’t part of it.”

  “I’ll contact the Vatican so they can get started with your early canonization.”

  “I was in two independent films; they made it into a few legitimate theaters.”

  “Yeah?” Clete said.

  “I’ll tell you something else. The porn guy on Airline? He almost nailed the hijackers before 9/11. He tried to get ahold of somebody at the FBI. He said the ragheads buying dirty films from him weren’t religious fanatics, they were dege
nerates and rod floggers, like most of his clientele. The message got lost or delayed or something. A few days later the Towers and the Pentagon got hit. True story. So how about it?”

  “How about what?”

  “Will you put in a word for me with Robicheaux’s daughter? She’s the screenwriter for this Civil War film. I’m a pretty good actor. I just want a shot.”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “No kidding?”

  “I’ll tell her you’re available.”

  “You’re okay, Purcel. Not like what I’m always hearing.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Anything,” Swede said.

  “Keep the Nightingales away from me. And don’t give Alafair any trouble. Think of me as her uncle.”

  “I owe you a solid, man.”

  Clete watched him walk away whistling, flipping his hat into the air and catching it on his head. He turned around and gave Clete a thumbs-up.

  FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD Clete. As simple-minded people are wont to do, they put him into categories. He was a compulsive gambler, a disgraced cop who’d flushed his career with weed and booze, a mercenary who should be considered a traitor, a lover of women who belonged in straitjackets, a human wrecking ball, a child in a man’s body, a rum-dum living on yesterday’s box score, a former leg-breaker for the Mob, and most realistically, a dangerous, war-damaged man whose unpredictable moods could lay waste to half a city.

  But as with all simple-minded and dismissive people, they were wrong. And not only were his detractors wrong, none of them could shine his shoes. Clete was one of the most intelligent people I ever knew, and one of the most humble, less out of virtue than his inability to understand his own goodness. He was so brave that he didn’t know how to be afraid. In the same fashion, he was generous because he cared little about money or social status or ownership, except for his Caddy convertibles. His physical appetites were enormous. So was his capacity for self-destruction. His father the milkman had taught Clete to hate himself, and Clete had spent a lifetime trying to unlearn the lesson.

  The people who understood him best were usually in the life. Grifters, hookers, money washers at the track, street dips, Murphy artists, and shylocks respected him. So did uptown house creeps and old-time petemen. Button men avoided him. So did strong-arm robbers and child molesters; men who abused women or animals were terrified of him. When Clete’s anger was unleashed, he transformed into someone larger than himself. His fists seemed as big as cantaloupes, his pocked neck as hard as a fire hydrant; his arms and shoulders would split his clothes. He dropped a New Jersey hit man off a roof through the top of a greenhouse. He hooked his hand into a Teamster official’s mouth and slung him from a balcony into a dry swimming pool. He almost drowned a NOPD vice cop in a toilet bowl. He burned down a plantation home on Bayou Teche, fire-hosed a gangster across the restroom floor in a casino, pushed a sadist off the rim of a canyon in Montana, filled a mobbed-up politician’s antique convertible with concrete, went berserk in a St. Martinville pool hall and piled five unconscious outlaw bikers in a corner and would have doubled the number with a baseball bat if Helen Soileau hadn’t talked him into cuffing himself.

  He was the trickster from folk mythology who flung scat at respectability. But he was a far more complicated man, in essence a Greek tragedy, a Promethean figure no one recognized as such, a member of the just men in Jewish legend who suffered for the rest of us. If there are angels among us, as St. Paul suggests, I believed Clete was one of them, his wings auraed with smoke, his cloak rolled in blood, his sword broken in battle but unsurrendered and unsheathed, a protector whose genus went back to Thermopylae and Masada.

  He pulled to the curb as I was walking home from work. He was eating a spearmint sno’ball, the top of the Caddy down. “I had a talk with Emmeline Nightingale in the park today.”

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “Is Alafair home?”

  “Probably.”

  “Ms. Nightingale’s chauffeur would like a part in her picture.”

  “What are you up to, Clete?”

  “I thought that would get your attention. Get in.”

  That’s how it worked. Clete would roll the dice, and I would get stuck with the math. I opened the door and sat back in the seat. He was wearing aviator shades and a Hawaiian shirt with hula girls on it. The sunlight through the trees was as red as a ruby on his skin. He pulled away from the curb, driving with the heel of his hand, like a 1950s lowrider.

  “What’s this about the chauffeur?” I said.

  “I just wanted to get you in the car. Ms. Nightingale wants to hire me.”

  “Hire you?”

  “She says it’s to keep Levon Broussard off her back.”

  “That’s not it?”

  “I think she knows I might be in a relationship with Sherry Picard.”

  We bounced into my driveway. “A relationship?” I said.

  “Yeah, we got it on. I’m seeing her tonight.”

  “Leave out the particulars. What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “There you go again.”

  “I just asked a question. You can’t take care of yourself.”

  “That’s it. No matter what I say, you’re on my case. I’m too old. I should put my stiff one-eye in a safe-deposit box. I drink too much. I eat the wrong food. How about respecting my space for a change?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I worry about you.”

  “Remember how you used to bounce your stick on the curb in the Quarter? Everyone thought you were signaling me about a crime in progress. You were telling me to meet you at the Acme for a dozen on the half shell.”

  “We’ll do it again, too,” I said.

  He swallowed the rest of his sno’ball, a green ribbon running from the corner of his mouth when he smiled. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”

  “You really offered to help the Nightingale chauffeur with Alafair?”

  “He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, although I got the feeling he’s porking Ms. N., the way they look at each other and all.”

  “Why do you think she’s interested in your relationship with Sherry Picard?” I said.

  “Maybe she wants to make sure Broussard goes down for the Kevin Penny homicide.”

  “You think she could have done Penny?” I said.

  “Ever look into her eyes? Two inkwells, midnight blue. She has antifreeze for blood.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I think Jimmy Nightingale killed Penny or had it done.”

  “I don’t think you’re entirely objective, Cletus.”

  “You’re right. I’d love to bust a cap on that guy.”

  “Why does he get to you?”

  “He scares me. I can’t shake the feeling.”

  * * *

  EVER HAVE CONFLICT with the concept of mercy? I’m talking about those challenges to our Judeo-Christian ethos that require us to forgive or at least not to judge and to surrender the situation to a Higher Authority. That’s badly put. The challenge is not the venerable tradition. The real issue lies in the possibility that the person to whom you’re extending mercy will repay your trust by cutting you from your liver to your lights.

  That’s why I hated to be in the proximity of Spade Labiche. There was an accusatory neediness in his face, a baleful light in his eyes, as though others were responsible for his lack of success and the monetary gain and happiness that should have been his. Friday morning, he opened my door without knocking. “Can I throw up on your rug for a minute?”

  How about that for humor?

  “I’m pretty busy, Spade.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “I got to talk to somebody. How about it, Robicheaux? You know the score, man. Not many people around here do.”

  “Come in.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He sat down in front of my desk and lit a cigarette.

  “Not in the building, partner.”

>   “I forgot.” He mashed out the cigarette on the inside of my trash basket and let the butt fall on top of my wastepaper. There was a razor nick on his jawline and one under his left nostril. I could smell cloves on his breath. “What’s the update on this guy with the cannon that blows heads off at eight hundred yards?”

  “There isn’t any.”

  His face looked like a white prune. “No prints, no brass, no feds involved, no guesses about the identity of the shooter?”

  “Nope.”

  “Look, I knew people in Miami who had a couple of hotels rigged to set up congressmen and business types out for a good time. The skanks would be in the bar and get these guys juiced up and in front of a hidden camera that would film stuff you couldn’t buy in Tijuana. They’d squeeze these poor bastards for years. They had a perv working them, a guy they called Smiley. He never took a pinch, not for anything.”

  “What kind of perv?”

  “He gets off on splattering brain matter, that kind of perv.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I think my number is up,” he said. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “It’s a feeling you get. It’s like malaria or rheumatic fever. You feel sick all over and can’t shake it. I tried to tell you this before, man. You wouldn’t listen.”

  “The first time I went down a night trail, I couldn’t stop my teeth from clicking,” I said. “A kid on point hit a trip wire and was screaming in the dark. We had to go after him. There were toe poppers all over the place. I didn’t think I could make myself walk through them. Then an old-time line sergeant whispered something to me I never forgot: ‘Don’t think about it before you do it, Loot, and don’t think about it after it’s over.’ What’s this dog shit about a sex sting in Miami?”

  He pressed a hand against his stomach, grimacing. “I think I got an ulcer.”

  I opened my drawer and threw him a roll of TUMS. “Catch.”

  “You’re a coldhearted man.”

  “This perv named Smiley is going to take you out?”

  “People think I know things I don’t. I was in vice. You know what that means. I dealt with twenty-dollar whores and dime-bag black pukes. The average IQ was minus-ten.”

  “You took juice from Tony Nine Ball?”

  “Not juice. Tony’s associates had some stuff on me. So I cut their guys some slack a couple of times. Possession charges, nothing else. In Miami, not here.”