Robicheaux

Chapter 12

When I got home, there were two messages on the machine from Babette Latiolais. I played the first one: “Mr. Dave, I got to talk wit’ you. Call me back.”

She didn’t leave her number. I copied it from the caller ID. The second message was recorded forty-five minutes later: “Mr. Dave, where you at? I t’ink maybe I seen that guy last night. Please call me. Don’t come to the bar-and-grill, no. My boss seen us talking and axed if I was in trouble. I cain’t lose my job.” I called her number and went immediately to voicemail. I tried again that evening, with the same result.

Clete Purcel returned from two days of fishing, sunburned and flecked with fish blood and smelling of beer and sunblock and weed. He told me about his conversation with Kevin Penny.

“You think he’s going to treat his boy all right?” I said.

“Probably not. It was like having a conversation with a septic tank.”

“You did your best.”

“There’s only one solution for a guy like Penny.”

I saw the look in his eyes. “Negative on that, Cletus.”

“If he hurts that boy, I’m going to bust a cap on him.”

“And stack his time. How smart is that?”

“If either one of us was smart, we wouldn’t be who we are. Maybe we’d be wiseguys. Or stockbrokers. You got to be careful what you wish for.”

I had learned long ago to stay out of Clete’s head. If you let him alone, his moods usually passed. If they didn’t, you got out of his way.

He showered and put on fresh clothes at his motor court, and he and Alafair and I went to a movie. In the morning I called Babette again. There was no answer. I gave up and this time left no message.

Monday night, just after I had drifted off to sleep, the phone rang in the kitchen. I looked at the caller ID and picked it up in the dark. The moon was up, and a light rain was clicking on the roof and the trees. “Babette?”

“I’m sorry I ain’t got back to you,” she said. “I moved my little girl to my mama’s house in Breaux Bridge.”

“Has somebody bothered you?”

“No, suh, but like I said on the machine, I t’ink I seen the man again, the one who was taking to Mr. Spade.”

“Where?”

“At the Walmart. He didn’t have a basket or nothing. He was maybe t’irty feet away, looking at me. He said, ‘Hi, you pretty thing. Come have a hot dog.’ ”

“You’re sure it was the same man?”

“He looked a little different, but I’m pretty sure it was the man in the picture you showed me, the one who was outside the bar-and-grill.”

“He was different how?” I asked.

“Like he’d been in a fight.”

“Say that again?”

“His face was swole up. I called to tell you everything is all right and you don’t need to worry no more. I got ahold of Mr. Spade.”

“Back up, Babette.”

“He ain’t in the phone book, but a waitress I know had his number. So I told him about me talking to you and me seeing the guy again and how I don’t want no trouble or to be saying anything bad about nobody.”

I could feel the floor shifting under my feet. “Listen to me, Babette. Don’t talk any more with Spade Labiche. Stay away from him. He’s not a good guy.”

“I ain’t supposed to talk to the police?”

“The man with the swollen face is a dangerous and violent career criminal. I don’t know why he was with Labiche, but I’m going to find out. What happened after you saw the man at Walmart?”

“Nothing. He just walked away.”

“What did Labiche tell you?”

“He said not to worry. He said the guy was just axing him directions and he didn’t know nothing about him. That ain’t true?”

“It could be,” I said.

“It could be? Oh, Mr. Dave, what I’m gonna do?”

“If you feel threatened, you can stay with my daughter and me.”

“That don’t sound right. I cain’t live off other people.”

I didn’t know what to say. Who is usually the victim of a criminal? The most innocent of the innocent, and usually those who can least afford the attrition.

“Are you there, Mr. Dave?”

“I’m going to talk to my friend Clete Purcel. He’s a private investigator. If you’re with him, no one will ever hurt you. Give me your address.”

I went into Labiche’s office the next morning. “How you doin’, Spade?” I said.

He was drinking coffee from a white mug with Wonder Woman on it. “What’s on your mind, Dave?”

“You know Babette Latiolais? She works at the bar-and-grill.”

“What about her?”

“She call you?”

He set the mug down. “Yeah, she did. What do you want to know?”

“She’s a nice lady, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Nice. Good-looking tits. Probably a sweet piece of barbecue. What else you want to know?”

“Why don’t you show some respect?”

“I don’t know what it is with you, Robicheaux. You’ve got a two-by-four with nails in it shoved up your ass every time I see you.”

“She saw you with a guy who sounds a lot like Kevin Penny. She doesn’t know Penny. She has no connection with Penny. She didn’t dime you about Penny. She simply described a man who looks like him. You were talking to him in the parking lot outside the bar-and-grill where she works. What about it? Is Penny a confidential informant?”

“Number one, I never heard of this guy. Number two, if he was my snitch, I wouldn’t meet him in a public place.”

“I’m glad you’ve cleared all that up, Spade. I heard you were undercover in Liberty City. How’d you get along with the Jamaicans?”

“Fine. They love the color green.”

“You ever see their transporters land in the Glades?”

“A few times.”

“Did you know the guys transporting coke on I-10?”

“Most of them were blacks the Colombians used like Kleenex.”

“They sure did a number on us. In three years this whole area was full of dope. New Orleans became the murder capital of America.”

“What’s your point?”

“I was just thinking about the systemic nature of the problem. It’s like a virus. Those women who were killed in Jeff Parish all had some relationship to the drug culture. The sales are five-and-dime stuff. All those lives were snuffed out for chump change.”

He toasted me with his cup before he drank, his fingers spread across Wonder Woman’s patriotically dressed body. “Close the door on your way out, will you?”

Be seeing you later, you lying motherfucker, I thought.

But Labiche had little to do with the origins of my anger. Maybe he was on a pad, maybe not. I suspected he was a sociopath. Every organization or institution has sociopaths. The objective is always power. People like Labiche function because they’re useful idiots.

Prostitution and drug trafficking cannot exist in a community without sanction. Vice is symbiotic and, like a leech, must attach itself to a cooperative host. That’s not hard to do. Once it’s established, digging it out of the tissue takes years, maybe generations. The majority of victims are people no one cares about. Even though the street sales seem nickel-and-dime in nature, the aggregate can be enormous. The coke is stepped on half a dozen times before it reaches the projects; the skag might have roach powder in it; the speed comes out of labs at Motel 6. But the number of addicts always grows; it never declines. The health and psychiatric problems of the afflicted are pushed off on social services. The big bonus for the dealers is the female trade. They’re compliant and easily managed; they provide freebies for corrupt cops; they’re never more than one day away.

Since Prohibition, vice on America’s southern rim has been run by individuals and families in Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, and Galveston. When Huey Long gave the state of Louisiana to Frank Costello, slot and racehorse machines appeared in every hotel lobby, drugstore, and saloon in the state, followed by an invasion of pimps, hookers, and even commercial fishers (they worked for the Mob in New Orleans and drained the lakes of crappie and sold them by the hundreds of thousands in Chicago). The system was like a pyramid. Everything at the bottom contributed to the top of the structure. In the life, it’s called piecing off the action. A working girl who didn’t understand that could get a cupful of acid in the face. I knew a black girl who was soaked with gasoline by two pimps and set on fire.

The minions at the bottom of the organization are myriad and need lead shoes on a windy day. But there is always one person at the top, and only one. In this case, the head guy was a steaming pile of gorilla shit known as Tony Nine Ball. All the elements in this story started with Fat Tony and the Civil War sword he planned to give to Levon Broussard, probably to involve Levon in one of Tony’s movie productions.

I told Helen I was checking out a cruiser and also where I was going with it.

“What for?” she said, hardly able to conceal the ennui in her voice.

“I think the deaths of the Jeff Davis Eight are indirectly on Nemo. I think the dope in Iberia Parish is, too.”

“What you’re really saying is somehow he’s connected to the murder of T. J. Dartez. That’s what you want to believe, isn’t it?”

“If you bruise Tony’s ego, he never forgets.”

“Do what you need to,” she said. “Watch your ass. Tony Nemo is a cruel man.”

“Does Spade Labiche have any reason for being around Kevin Penny?”

“Not to my knowledge. You know something I don’t?”

I told her how Babette Latiolais had tried to return Labiche’s lighter to him in the parking lot outside the bar-and-grill and had seen Penny talking with Labiche.

“Did you bring this up with Labiche?” Helen said.

“He denies knowing Penny or having any connection with him.”

“Did you tell him the barmaid informed on him?”

“She had already called Labiche. She knows him from the bar-and-grill. I was trying to put out the fire and indicate to Labiche that the girl wasn’t conspiring against him.”

“Take a breath.”

“It’s frustrating, Helen. This guy is a son of a bitch, and you’re pretending he’s not.”

“I’ll have a talk with him.” She got up from her desk and bit a hangnail, avoiding my eyes. “I’m worried about where the Dartez investigation is going. Your prints were on the broken window glass. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t.”

She cleared her throat. “This is eating a hole in my stomach.”

“Then turn everything over to the prosecutor’s office. I’ll go on leave without pay or resign.”

She looked sideways at me, her face so hot it was almost glowing. “The case isn’t prosecutable. Not as it stands. A defense attorney would keep you off the stand and present a dozen ways the prints could have gotten on the glass. That makes me glad. It also puts me in conflict with myself. You’re not the only person twisting in the wind, Pops.”

“I’m sorry you’re caught in this.”

“There may be another explanation about the prints,” she said. “Latents can be transferred. A microscopic examination can detect a forgery, but not always.”

“Labiche is manufacturing evidence?”

“He’s a mixed bag,” she replied. “He’s too nice around me. Always with the grin.”

“I’d better get going. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“Keep Clete out of this. No more Wild West antics at the O.K. Corral.”

“You have to admit Doc and Wyatt had clarity of line.”

“White man who think with forked brain not speak anymore. White man keep nose clean and not smart off unless white man want slap upside head. White man now get his ass out of my office.”

She wiggled her fingers at me.

I Hadn’t thought about the possibilities with Clete. After I signed out the cruiser, I stopped in the shade by the grotto and called his office on my cell. “Want to take a ride to the Big Sleazy?”

“What for?”

“To share a few oysters with Tony Squid.”

“I’ll be out front.”

Two minutes later, I pulled to the curb in front of his office. He was wearing his powder-blue sport coat and porkpie hat and freshly ironed gray slacks and tasseled loafers shined as bright as mirrors. His eyes were clear, his face ruddy, his youthfulness temporarily restored, as always when he went twenty-four hours without booze.

“Let’s rock,” he said. When he pulled open the door, his coat was heavier on one side than the other.

“What’s in your pocket?” I asked.

“Lint,” he replied.

Every weekday at noon, Tony could be found at one of two oyster bars in the Quarter, primarily because both had accommodations that could seat a gargantuan blob who had to spread his cheeks across a padded bench or two chairs pushed together. The restaurant also had to accommodate his oxygen cylinder and sometimes a nurse and a retinue of hangers-on and, of course, his bodyguards, Maximo Soza and JuJu Ladrine.

JuJu was half coon-ass and half Sicilian and could do squats with a five-hundred-pound bar across his shoulders. He wore blue suits and ties and starched white shirts, regardless of the heat, and in public always seemed embarrassed and popping with sweat and about to burst out of his clothes.

Maximo was another matter. He had a twenty-two-inch waist and the diminutive features of a child; he had been a jockey in Cuba. He wore a flat-topped gray knit cap with a bill and unironed slacks that flapped like rags and a suit coat buttoned tight at the waist and flared on the hips. He took orders from Tony as if there were no moral distinction between chauffeuring a limo and sticking an ice pick into one of Tony’s enemies.

I parked the cruiser in a garage on Royal, and Clete and I walked to the oyster bar and went inside. It was 12:05 P.M. Tony was sitting at a long table in a back corner, the checkered tablecloth set with a pitcher of sangria and baskets of sourdough bread. Maximo and JuJu were not Tony’s only companions. The man seated immediately next to him was famous for all the wrong reasons. Plastic surgery had transformed him from a homely Ichabod Crane born in the Midwest to a regal and tragic Jefferson Davis in the twilight of the Confederacy. He had been a leader of the Klan and the American Nazi Party and the friend of every white-supremacist group in the country. Then he discovered religion and was born again and wore his spirituality like a uniform. He had served in the Louisiana legislature and run for the presidency and the United States Senate. Then he went to Russia to promote his latest anti-Semitic book. While he was out of the country, the FBI got a warrant on his house and found his mailing list. He had been selling subscriptions to his racist publications and concealing the income from the IRS. Later, the multicultural nature of the prison shower room was not his favorite conversational subject.

Bobby Earl was his name, and manipulation was his game. During the peak of his career, women who affected the dress of Southern belles lined up to be photographed with him. Then the plastic surgeon’s handiwork began to soften and deteriorate and slip from the bone, and Bobby Earl’s face took on the appearance of wax held to a flame. His hair fell out, too, and he wore a wig that resembled barbershop sweepings glued to a plastic skullcap. While attending an anti-America/anti-Israel convention in Iran, he was interviewed on CNN and reduced by Wolf Blitzer to a raging idiot while spittle flew from his lips.

The hostess started to seat Clete and me at a small table.

“We’re with Mr. Nemo,” I said.

“Are you sure? He didn’t tell me others would be joining him,” she said.

Clete waved at Tony. “Sorry we’re late, big guy,” he said.

The hostess took us to the table and walked away quickly.

“You don’t mind, do you, Tony?” I said.

He looked up from his shrimp cocktail. “We’re eating, here.”

Clete and I opened our menus. Clete turned to JuJu and Maximo. “What do you guys recommend?”

Neither answered.

“You drink your breakfast, Purcel?” Tony said.

“Actually, I did. A protein shake with bananas and strawberries,” Clete said. “You ought to try it.”

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, Blimpo?”