Robicheaux

Chapter 22

At one time St. Mary Parish was a fiefdom ruled by an oligarchical family who owned everything and everyone in the parish, bar none. In the 1970s, when a group of activist Catholic nuns tried to organize the cane workers, they found themselves at mortal risk in an area that was more than ninety percent Catholic. Enforcement of the law was situational. Every public servant knew which ring to kiss. The people at the bottom of the pile were not necessarily abused, but they weren’t necessarily protected from abuse, either.

Sexual exploitation is not a subject most police departments like to deal with. But it’s often there. A cop picks up a hippie runaway hitchhiking. Maybe she’s holding, maybe she’s got a warrant on her, maybe she’s sixteen and her teeth are chattering. It’s twilight. She’s in the backseat, wrists cuffed behind her, trying to see where they’re going as the cop swings around on the shoulder and heads down a two-lane away from town. The cop has already dropped his badge inside his pocket so she won’t get his number.

His name was Jude McVane. Before he was a deputy sheriff, he was a chaser in a navy brig, a hack in a women’s prison, and a collector for a loan company. He had big hands and smelled of manly odors and was good at his paperwork because he did as little of it as possible. There were never any complaints about him. But his colleagues did not hang out with him after work hours, particularly those who were protective of their wives’ sensibilities.

At sunrise Thursday, he was driving his cruiser on a two-lane back road that followed the curves along Bayou Teche. The primroses were blooming on the edge of the cane fields, the sun spangling inside the tunnel of live oaks. He passed two antebellum homes built in the early nineteenth century, then crossed the drawbridge and turned in to a trailer village that belonged in Bangladesh. He stopped in front of a trailer occupied by a young black single mother. Without speaking, she exited the trailer, locked the door behind her, and got into the back of the cruiser.

“Good morning, sunshine,” McVane said.

She looked wanly out the window. He drove out of the trailer park and back across the drawbridge and past a closed sugar refinery. Then he hooked back in to the confines of the refinery on a dirt road and parked in the shade of a rusted-out tin shed.

“Nobody does it like you,” he said, getting in back.

When she was finished, she walked away from the cruiser and cleared her mouth and spat.

“I always heard it tastes like watermelon rind,” he said.

She refused to speak. He drove her back to her home and watched her get out and go inside. He shifted into gear and drove out of the trailer park and back over the Teche and headed toward Franklin. A solitary figure was walking around the edge of the road, dragging a wheeled case behind him, a beach bag hanging from his shoulder. McVane pulled alongside and rolled down the passenger window. “Where you going, partner?”

The man wore red tennis shoes and khakis that probably came from Target and a green T-shirt with Bugs Bunny eating a carrot on the front. “I’m touring the countryside. I got off the bus at the wrong place.”

“Where are you from?”

“New Or-yuns, originally. My name is Chester. Sometimes people call me Smiley.”

“Chester what?”

“Wimple. What’s yours?”

“Get in.”

“Why?”

“I’ll take you where you’re going.”

Chester leaned his head in the window and sniffed. “There’s been a woman in here.”

“Get in the cruiser, please.”

“I like walking.”

“I guess it’s going to be one of those days,” McVane said.

“All right. If you want to act like that. I don’t want to make anybody mad.” The man got inside and inhaled. “Icky.”

“What is?”

“Like somebody has been doing something he shouldn’t.”

“Buckle up,” McVane said. He drove down the road until he reached an oak grove. He turned inside it and cut the engine. “I have a feeling you got loose from an institution, Chester.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Let’s see your identification.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re being impolite and talking to me in a hurtful way.”

“I think you’re from Crazy Town, Chester. Crazy Town people have to be housed and fed and medicated. They also create shit piles of paperwork. Now get rid of the baby talk and show me your fucking ID.”

“I knew people like you in the orphanage. They were bullies and loudmouths and had no manners.”

“You’re really starting to piss me off. Smart-mouth me again and I’ll slap you upside the head, boy.”

“I’m going to walk. You need to clean out this car. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“That’s it, you little geek. You’re under arrest.”

“For what?”

“Deliberately creating a dangerous situation on a state highway.”

“That’s silly.”

McVane got out and came around the front of the cruiser and ripped open the passenger door. Chester was putting on a pair of cotton gloves.

“What are you doing with those gloves?” McVane said.

“I don’t want to touch anything in your nasty car.”

McVane reached for him. Then, for the first time, he saw the absence of light in Chester’s eyes. He’d seen it before, once in a lockdown unit at Miramar in the eyes of a female prisoner who had murdered her children; and once in the eyes of a woman he’d sodomized in the back of a liquor store. The revolver was a .357 Magnum, the bullets in the cylinder fat and round and hollow-pointed. The words he wanted to say were trapped inside a gaseous and foul bubble in his throat, the release of his sphincter like wet newspaper tearing apart, his fear so intense he pulled his weapon crookedly from the holster and fumbled it onto the grass.

He tried to smile at his ineptitude, giving up all pretense at manliness, hoping for mercy. The slug hit him in the upper lip like a sledgehammer, and the back of his skull exploded in a gush of bone and brain matter, similar to a grapefruit bursting.

Chester walked around to the driver’s side and picked up McVane’s hat from the dashboard and put it on, then straightened it in the side mirror. The engine was still running. He climbed in and drove away, remembering the ten-two position on the steering wheel that he had learned in driving school.

My, what a fine morning it was. He hit the whoop-whoop button a couple of times and wondered if he shouldn’t apply for the police force somewhere. He’d probably be pretty good at it, he thought. It was time someone did something about the number of criminals and no-goods overrunning the countryside.

The body was located right by the St. Mary/Iberia Parish line. The cruiser had been driven through New Iberia, past City Hall and my house and out to Spanish Lake, and left half submerged in the water. The wind was blowing at thirty knots; no fishermen were on the lake. A black kid who worked in the bait shop said he’d seen the cruiser drive on top of the levee to the north end of the lake, but he’d paid little attention, because sometimes policemen stopped at the lake to eat lunch or take a smoke. He said he’d seen a man walking past the bait shop a half hour later; the man was pulling a small suitcase, but he didn’t remember what the man looked like.

Helen and I watched the wrecker pull the cruiser from the cattails, the doors gushing water and mud. We had already been to the crime scene on the parish line, but we had gone in separate vehicles and had talked little among ourselves.

“Somebody shoots a deputy, steals the cruiser, drives through town, and dumps it in a lake in broad daylight?” she said.

“We get them all, don’t we?”

I walked down the embankment and looked through the driver’s window. A deputy sheriff’s hat was floating on the floor. The cut-down twelve-gauge pump was still locked in place on the dash. “You ever meet this guy?”

“McVane?” she said.

“Yeah, you ever meet him?”

“No. What’s the story?” she said.

“He had a bad rep with his colleagues.”

“For what?”

“Black women didn’t always go to jail.”

“You think it was one of them?” she asked.

“How many poor black women carry a firearm that can blow a hole the size of a tangerine in a guy’s head? Also, he was shot at close range outside the cruiser. There were no other car tracks in the oak grove. Either he met somebody who was on foot, or the person was in his cruiser and the two of them got out and the shooter made his move.”

“Our guy didn’t see it coming, either,” she said.

“Probably not.”

“It’s your baby, Streak.”

“I’ve got enough on my desk, Helen.”

“Sorry, Pops.”

“I don’t get along well with the guys in St. Mary Parish.”

“Boo-hoo,” she replied.

She got into her vehicle and drove away. I returned to the crime scene on the parish line. Everyone was gone. I stepped inside the tape. The wind was still up, bending the grass inside the grove, some of it stiff with blood. The spray pattern of the wound pointed toward the bayou. I stood next to the place the body had been and pressed my hands together and formed a V, like the needle on a compass. Then I aimed between my thumbs as though through iron sights, trying to see where the bullet could have gone. The trees were widely spaced, which was not helpful.

I tried to see the shooter inside my head. Nobody likes cop killers, even when they kill a guy like McVane. Most of them go out smoking. Usually, they’re almost hysterical with fear and get as stoned and drunk as they can before they check out. Sometimes they take their families with them. A cop killer on the loose is like a tiger prowling a school yard. You’re going to hear a lot from him until someone pulls his plug.

The size and character of the entrance and exit wounds indicated the bullet was of large caliber and fired from a serious gun. The round was probably a hollow-point or a dum-dum or a soft-nose that had been notched. The shooter was probably a man, big enough to carry the weapon on his person without McVane noticing it. But why did McVane pull in to the grove? The St. Mary cops said he didn’t smoke. The grove was too visible for a tryst or even for harmless goofing off on the job. Maybe he was doing his paperwork when a hitchhiker walked up on him. But why would an armed hitchhiker walk up on a cop he didn’t know and shoot him in cold blood?

Maybe the shooter was a fugitive. Maybe he did something suspicious on the road and McVane questioned him. But McVane didn’t call in the encounter, and he hadn’t been alarmed to the point of drawing his weapon, at least not until it was too late.

I looked at the serenity inside the grove, the wind scudding on the bayou, the moss straightening in the trees. It was the kind of spot you associate with rest, peace of mind, withdrawal from the fray. It was an unlikely place for a violent confrontation, a disruption caused by two disparate personalities trying to kill each other, one succeeding.

Why was McVane late in pulling his gun? He was outside the cruiser, at some point obviously aware that he was in mortal danger. Why did he let his defenses down? This wasn’t consistent with the image of a cop who, according to his colleagues, cut suspects no slack and cuffed and searched them roughly and hooked them to a D-ring on the cruiser’s floor.

I didn’t believe the shooter was local. Aside from two antebellum homes, there were only a few trailers and abandoned shacks spaced along the two-lane, and they were not occupied by the kind of people who would chat up a cop like McVane.

It had to be a hitchhiker. Did McVane pick him up? An armed and dangerous man?

No, he must have known and trusted the shooter. But where did the gun come from? The weather was warm, and a hiker on the road wouldn’t have been wearing a coat. Perhaps he was carrying a bag or backpack. He was probably white. Someone so innocuous in appearance that McVane had no fear of him; someone he held in contempt. What kind of person would that be?

I began to see an image of the stroller or hitchhiker, a seemingly harmless character made of Play-Doh, one with a soft mouth and girlish hips and buttocks that waddled, the perfect target for a virile and strong and sadistic male.

Back to weaponry and ballistics. No shell casing had been found. Unless the shooter picked up his brass, the weapon was a revolver. The fatal round had exited the back of McVane’s head and had to be somewhere. It was not inside the blood and brain matter on the grass, which meant it may not have fragmented.

I went from tree trunk to tree trunk, running my hands over the bark. I looked down the slope. The Teche was a tidal stream that swelled up on the banks each day and receded with the influences of the moon. The surface was yellow and swollen and churning with mud and leaves and tree branches scattered by the same high winds that had swept through the area earlier in the day. A rowboat was tied to a cypress root a few feet down the bank. On the far side of the bayou was a weathered boathouse with a sagging dock. I got into the boat and rowed across.

Sometimes you get lucky. A bullet was lodged in the door. I opened my pocketknife and eased it out of the wood. The nose was flattened, the sides morphed out of shape, like a piece of bent licorice. The striations were intact. I wrapped the bullet in a handkerchief and wadded up the handkerchief and put it into my pocket, then rowed back across the bayou.

I called Helen and told her what I had found.

“Take it to the lab,” she said.

“Want me to check in with the locals?”

“In St. Mary Parish?” she said.

“I may make a stop before I head back.”

“Stop where?”

“Maybe the shooter was on an errand and McVane messed up his plan.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Jimmy Nightingale’s place is just down the road. Maybe he was a target.”

“Why?”

“Jimmy’s predecessors are Huey Long and George Wallace. I think he’ll come to the same end.”

“It’s your case. Talk to you later,” she said.

Even after Jimmy had told me about the bombing of the Indian village, I did not want to believe he was an evil man. Even though I had concluded in my report that he’d attacked Rowena Broussard, I believed his mind had been addled by booze and hash and driven more by desire than by sadistic intent. Why did I not want to believe these things? Like most of us who subscribe to the egalitarian traditions of Jefferson and Lincoln, I did not want to believe that a basically likable man could, with indifference and without provocation, commit deeds that were not only wicked but destroyed the lives of defenseless people. I also reminded myself that Jimmy was haunted by guilt, which is not the trademark of the unredeemable.

As I pulled up to the Nightingale mansion on the bayou, I did not realize I was about to see a drama that could have come from the stage of the Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames. I heard shouting on the patio and walked around the side of the house and saw Bobby Earl and Emmeline Nightingale four feet apart, red-faced and hurling invective at each other. Down the slope, Jimmy was calmly whocking golf balls high into the sky, watching them drop into the bayou. His chauffeur, the peroxided one with the steroid-puffed physique and caved-in face, stood by his side, waiting to put a fresh tee and ball on the grass. None of them saw me.

Earl’s face was trembling. “He denounced me on national television. Do you know what this has done to me? I went to prison for our cause.”

“You went to prison for tax evasion,” Emmeline said.

“I gave him my constituency.”

“You don’t have one. Now get off our property.”

“You’re a poisonous creature, Emmeline. The Great Whore of Babylon in the making.”

“And you’re a self-important public fool. Good God, I don’t know how Jimmy stands you.”

“Hello?” I said.

They both looked at me as though awakening from a dream.

“What do you want, Mr. Robicheaux?” Emmeline asked.

“A word with you and Jimmy,” I said. “Bobby doesn’t need to hang around.”

Earl’s face was full of hurt, like a child’s. This was the same man who had inflamed the passions of the great unwashed, then disavowed their actions when they burned and bombed and lynched. But I realized that, instead of the devil, I was looking at a moth batting its wings around a light that had grown cold.

He had a pot stomach, like a balloon filled with water; his face was lined, his eyes tired. There was a pout on his mouth. “You remember that time you hit me?”

“I do,” I replied.

“It was a sucker punch. I had no chance to defend myself.”

“You asked for it, and you were looking me straight in the face.”

His eyes were wet. “The Nightingales wouldn’t let you clean their bathroom, Dave.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “And don’t call me Dave.”

Jimmy walked up the slope, his golf club propped on his shoulder. “I must have missed out on quite a discussion.”

“I told Bobby to leave,” Emmeline said.

“Better do as she says, Bobby,” Jimmy said. “She’s tough.”

“You’ve betrayed me,” Earl said.

“Two paths diverged in a woods,” Jimmy said. “You should have followed mine, not yours.”

“A pox on both y’all,” Earl said.

“Work on your accent,” Emmeline said. “Everyone knows you’re from Kansas.”

Earl’s face seemed to dissolve. He walked away, trying to hold himself erect. When he got into his car, he looked back at the patio. By then Emmeline was removing a pitcher of iced tea and the glasses from the table, and Jimmy was wiping off the mahogany head of his club with a rag. I had the feeling that if there is an invisible hell people carry with them, Earl had found it.

“What puts you at our door, Dave?” Jimmy said.

“A cop was shot and killed not far from your home. We don’t know why. Nor do we have anything on the shooter.”

“And?”

“You’re a famous man,” I said.

“I heard the cop didn’t have a big fan club.”

“The people he abused are not the kind who smoke cops.”

“I don’t think this fellow’s demise has anything to do with me. Want to hit some balls?”

“Listen to him, Jimmy,” Emmeline said.

“This is how I feel about death,” he said. “I’ve had a good life. If a stranger walks up to me and parks one in my brain, I’ll thank him for waiting as long as he did.”

“The cop’s name was McVane,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I thought maybe he took a bullet for you. But who knows? Maybe the guy was trafficking. Or maybe an ex-lover got him. You never know.”

“There are people out there who want to hurt Jimmy, but not because he’s running for office,” Emmeline said. “That gangster in New Orleans is actually putting together an adaptation of Levon Broussard’s work.”

“Tony Nemo?”

“Yes, the same obscene pile you people could never put in jail,” she said. “Jimmy had everything ready to go, then you went along with Rowena Broussard’s lies and destroyed Jimmy’s chances of producing the film. When this is over, I’m going to personally sue you into oblivion.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m mortgaged up to my eyes and not worth suing.”

I saw Jimmy laugh silently behind her back.

“What, you think that’s funny?” she said to me.

“No,” I said, barely able to stifle a grin.

I hated to admit Jimmy Nightingale still had a hold on me. I guess that’s just the way it was, growing up in a place like Louisiana, where pagan deities sometimes hide among us and we secretly champion rogues who get even for the rest of us.

The round was a .357 Magnum. We got a priority in processing at the National Crime Information Center because the round had been recovered from a homicide scene. The weapon that had probably killed McVane was an electronic match with six other bullets fired from the same weapon over a seven-year period, most recently in Algiers, where two black men were shot to death in the kitchen of a rented house full of crack paraphernalia.

I spent the next three days talking to cops in Orleans Parish, Tampa, Key West, Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Other than the two crack dealers, the victims were a retired button man from Yonkers, a bartender who shilled for a craps game, a serial pedophile, and a shylock. The obvious common denominator in the victims was criminality. But if these were Mob-connected hits, the usual pattern wasn’t there. Button men (so known because they pushed the “off” button on their victims) didn’t use the same weapon repeatedly. They also favored a smaller-caliber handgun, because the bullet slowed more quickly and bounced around inside the brain pan. Their classic execution featured one round through the forehead, one in the mouth, and one in the ear. Our shooter seemed spontaneous and left wounds all over the map. He had a way of painting the walls in public, too, without anyone ever getting a good description of him.

For example: He walked into a clam house in Brooklyn and fired point-blank into the face of an infamous gangster who was having a midnight dinner with a beloved television actor. The shooter was so nondescript that no one could remember a distinguishing detail about him. One diner said the man picked up a raw oyster on the way out and sucked it from the shell, and apologized to the diner for disturbing his meal.

I went into Helen’s office and told her everything I had.

“This sounds like either an East Coast hitter or a maniac,” she said.

“Or both.”

“What’s he doing here?” she said.

“At least we know it probably wasn’t about McVane. But that means the real target is still out there.”

“Nightingale?”

“That would be my bet.”

“You said Nightingale blew you off.”

“His sister didn’t. She thinks Tony Nemo wants to take Jimmy off the board because Jimmy wants to produce Levon Broussard’s work.”

“No wonder most films hurt my eyeballs,” she said. She spun her ballpoint on her desk pad.

“Something else bothering you?”

“The prosecutor’s office. Lala Segretti thinks you should retire.” She kept her gaze straight ahead, not looking at me. “He says the Dartez homicide and investigation will always be a subject of scandal.”

“What’s your opinion?”

“If you go, I go, too.”

“Nobody got me drunk except me.”

“The DA has got his head up his ass on this one,” she said.

“You’re a loyal friend, Helen.”

She massaged the back of her neck with both hands, her breasts swelling against her shirt. “And shit goes great with vanilla ice cream.”

I didn’t try to think through that last one.