Robicheaux

Chapter 27

Two months passed. The man in red tennis shoes seemed to have disappeared. The days were long and hot, the palm fronds and banana plants rattling dryly when the wind blew. Years ago, during the summer, rain showers fell throughout southern Louisiana at almost exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Now the gumbo soil in the sugarcane field was baked as hard as ceramic and cracked just as easily.

Most people believe that law enforcement and the solving of crimes and the apprehension and prosecution of criminals proceed in a systematic, linear fashion. The opposite is true. A successful outcome is usually produced by informants and dumb luck. The waiting, the missed opportunities, the bureaucracy, the tainted or lost evidence, the witnesses who change their accounts are endless. Lassitude, frustration, and anger become a way of life.

Mrs. Dartez continued to tell anyone who would listen that I was the murderer of her husband. The prosecution of Levon Broussard for the murder of Kevin Penny crept forward in Jefferson Davis Parish. Location scouts and line producers working for Levon and Tony Nine Ball began arriving in town, with all the attendant excitement. Homer was taken away from Clete and placed in a foster home, but he ran away and crawled through a window in Clete’s cottage and hid there for two days until Clete returned from his office in New Orleans. So far, the social welfare agency had not tried to take him back. Alafair finished her initial adaptation of Levon’s book, then consented to do the polish and to stay on the set after production began. Levon was drunk a lot. I went to meetings. Spade Labiche stayed in the background and said little, although I still believed that every day was his Ides of March. And no one talked anymore about the Jeff Davis Eight.

But while the rest of us were absorbed with our minutiae, Jimmy Nightingale was on the move. He appeared on network morning shows. He was the emissary of the New South, urbane and humble and jocular, a self-deprecating glint of the rogue in his eye. The host or hostess threw him softball questions about his casinos, his oligarchical history, his association with scum like Tony the Squid. He was the aviator who flew biplanes under bridges, an oilman who warned about global warming, an advocate for rural blacks whose neighborhoods were dumping ponds for petroleum waste. One host compared him to the young Bill Clinton, another to the young John F. Kennedy. When Jimmy got finished with an interview, the audience had one reaction: thunderous heartfelt applause.

On a dark night, the clouds crackling with dry lightning, Clete Purcel was knocking back shots in an end-of-the-line mixed-race joint in North Lafayette, the kind that had a pine-plank bar and red bulbs above the mirrors and where the clientele copulated in their cars without embarrassment. It was set back from the highway in a black neighborhood where some of the streets were still unpaved and desiccated privies still stood in backyards. Clete had a shot glass and a small pitcher of beer in front of him, and he stood rather than sat at the bar so he could watch the door. The air was thick was smoke, the restroom door open and stinking of urine and ammonia and weed. He could only guess at the race of the people around him.

A woman in jeans and boots and a western shirt came through the front door, her black hair tied up with a bandana. He had to rub his eyes with the backs of his wrist to make sure his vision wasn’t failing him. She stood next to him and looked around. “This is where you hang out?”

“I’m supposed to meet a skip,” he replied.

“What’d he skip on?”

“Felony assault, a fifty-grand bond. Were you looking for me?”

“I went by the motor court. Homer was alone. He said you were here.”

He felt his face burn. “I check on him every thirty minutes.”

“He’s a nice kid.”

“I know that, Miss Sherry. You want a drink?”

“Just a glass.” She tinked a fingernail against the pitcher. “Let’s go over in the corner. God, what a dump.”

They sat at a table by a painted-over window, a wood-bladed fan turning overhead. She had carried a clean glass from the bar. He poured it full, the foam running over the edge. He kept his eyes on the door, waiting for a skip who was probably a no-show.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about the Penny investigation,” she said.

“Levon Broussard is going down for it, right?”

“Too many people think Penny got what he deserved. Tony Nine Ball’s influences aren’t to be taken lightly, either.”

“Tony got to somebody?” Clete said.

“That’s why squids have tentacles.”

“Dave Robicheaux thought the guy in red tennis shoes was going to clip Tony.”

“Why?” she said.

“The guy’s a cleaner.”

“Somebody bigger than Tony Nemo is pulling the strings?”

“Or the agenda is bigger than Nemo’s,” he said. “Do you know who was the only guy to deal successfully with the Mafia?”

“No,” she said.

“Mussolini. I grew up in the Irish Channel with those guys. I worked for some of them. In Vegas and Reno and Montana.”

Her eyes searched his. “Yeah?”

“They broke my hand with a car door. Later, some of them went off-line,” he said.

“You’re a funny guy. I don’t mean like strange. You’re just a different kind of guy.”

Once again Clete felt his old enemy come back. As a boy, he’d hated delivering milk off his father’s truck to the back doors of the rich in the Garden District. He’d hated the welfare store where the clothes he was given were generic and ill-fitting; he’d hated the cops who’d hauled his parents out of the house when they were drunk and fighting; he’d hated his father for beating him with a razor strop and making him kneel all night on grains of rice; he’d hated a nun who’d told him he was unwashed, and a priest who’d shut the confessional window in his face when he was twelve years old. These moments should have disappeared long ago, but every time Clete looked into the eyes of a normal person, the dead coals he had carried for decades burst alight, giving life to every dark memory in his unconscious, telling him once again he was worthless in the sight of God and man.

“I don’t like to talk much about myself,” he said. “Not because I’m humble. On my best day, I never got more than a C-minus. That includes time in the Crotch.”

“I checked you out. You have the Navy Cross.”

“I got it while I was running in the wrong direction. How about we ditch yesterday’s box score?”

He tilted the pitcher to fill her glass, but she covered it with her hand.

“Sometimes I get the blues,” she said. “That’s when I know I shouldn’t drink too much. If I do, I really get the blues. I like Emmylou Harris’s line: ‘I got the rhythm, and I don’t need the blues.’ ”

“You’re talking about your husband?”

“He was a West Point graduate. He could have been an academic, but he went to Ranger school. He loved the army. He was killed by friendly fire.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stole a look at her eyes. She was looking at the bar. A man was telling a dirty joke to two women, both of them disheveled, grinning. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?” she asked.

“I’m not too smart about these things. I’m old, too.”

“So is the earth. Is your guy going to show?”

Clete glanced at his watch, the same one he’d owned since the Corps. The hands had a soft green luminosity. “Probably not.”

“I’ll buy you a fish sandwich and a cup of coffee at McDonald’s,” she said.

“I don’t want to leave Homer alone too long.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Another thing. I was involved with this lady. I’m not now, but it wasn’t long ago, and she’s a nice lady.”

“The social worker?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She nodded.

“You’re beautiful, Miss Sherry. You got guts, too. I mean, working with some of those assholes in your department.”

“I got you. Lay off the personal inventory.”

“I don’t want to walk out of here feeling bad,” he said. Had he just said that? Why did he never have the words that accurately described his feelings? “I didn’t mean—”

“I’ve got to pee,” she said.

When she returned from the women’s room, she filled her glass with beer and drank it. “I’d better get going.”

“How about that fish sandwich?” he said.

She followed him to McDonald’s in her car. They ate in a booth. Heat lightning flared in the clouds and died somewhere over the Gulf. She said little. He wondered about the images she had seen through the telescopic sight on a sniper’s rifle, images she had created with the slow squeeze of a trigger.

“You go somewhere in your own head sometimes?” she said.

“On occasion.”

“You know what they say.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Don’t go into a bad neighborhood by yourself.”

“It’s the only neighborhood I have,” he replied.

She finished her sandwich and wiped her mouth. There was lipstick on the paper napkin when she crumpled it in her hand.

“There’s a lady who stays over with Homer when I go out of town,” he said.

“It’s your call,” she said.

He cupped his cell phone. “I’ll be outside.”

The motel was halfway to Opelousas on the four-lane. There was a piney woods behind it and a fountain in front that glittered with pink and blue lights. She followed him there and went into the lobby by his side.

During the night he dreamed of a ville burning, the sparks spinning into the sky. Then the dream changed and he heard the 105s coming in short on his position, a whistling sound like truck tires on a wet highway. When he woke, the ceiling was shaking with thunder. He went into the bathroom in his skivvies and opened the window. The only sound he heard was the wind in the pines, their needles orange with drought and blight.

When he went back to bed, he took his snub-nose out of its holster and slipped it under his pillow for reasons he didn’t understand. Audie Murphy did it. And probably thousands of other guys who never told anybody about it. Why not Clete Purcel? He lay awake most of the night, trying to provide himself explanations that had eluded him all his life.

On a Saturday morning, Alafair came back early from filming outside St. Martinville. She went into the kitchen and took one of my diet Dr Peppers out of the icebox and drank it from the can.

“Something happen with the Hollywood crowd?” I said.

“They’re midlevel pond scum. Neither good nor bad. Just run-of-the-mill scum.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Levon Broussard.”

“What’s wrong with Levon?”

“He’s a closet elitist. Rather than work with conventional film people, he signed on with a bunch of simian throwbacks who hide behind sunglasses and are afraid to talk at the table because they sound like they have throat cancer and a vocabulary of fewer than a dozen words. In the meantime, he pretends.”

“Pretends what?”

“That he’s on a mission. He insists on hiring only union people. The food has to be of a certain organic quality. The actors should be included in our script meetings. The black actors have to be given more lines. I think this is all a cover-up for what’s really in his head.”

“What’s in his head?”

“Guilt. Hatred of the truth about his ancestors.”

“You knew this, Alf,” I said.

“I didn’t know Levon would show up every morning unshaven with booze on his breath and crazy changes in the script.”

“Maybe it’s time to cut loose from these guys,” I said.

“I don’t want to lose my work.”

“Then don’t worry about it.”

“Levon claims he didn’t kill Kevin Penny. I think he’s capable of it. I also think he’s capable of doing Jimmy Nightingale harm.”

“You’re suggesting Levon might want to kill him?”

“Levon says Nightingale airdropped explosives on an Indian village in South America and killed women and children. That’s not true, is it?”

“I’m afraid it is, Alf. Jimmy told me about it.”

She couldn’t hide the look on her face. At age five she had survived an army massacre of her Salvadoran village. The soldiers had used machetes to hack open the bodies of pregnant Indian women.

“Why doesn’t the media say something about it?” she said.

“If people don’t care about eight poor women murdered in Jefferson Davis Parish, why would they care about some oilmen bombing Indians in Latin America?”

“Maybe Nightingale deserves a bullet in the face,” she said.

“I think he’s remorseful.”

“After the fact,” she said. “What a piece of shit.”

“Have another diet Doc with me,” I said.

“At least I had one laugh this morning.”

“At what?” I said, glad that we were through with the subject of Jimmy Nightingale and Tony Nemo and Levon Broussard.

“This cute little man was behind the cordon when we were filming a scene in St. Martinville. He had on a pale blue baseball cap and clothes out of the box from Penny’s. The tags were still on. He looked like a big ceramic doll. He’d read two of my novels.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, my interest fading.

“He was eating a fudge bar. He made me think of Truman Capote without the blubber.”

Mon Tee Coon was waddling through the backyard, side by side with our old warrior cat, Snuggs.

“Are you listening?” Alafair asked.

“Sure.”

“I’d love to use him as a character. He was such a cuddly little guy. He said his nickname was Smiley.”

“Cuddly?” I popped a Dr Pepper and went outside.

Chester drove a compact he had stolen down the bayou road, until he saw the refurbished antebellum home of the Nightingales. He passed the driveway and the tunnel of oaks that led to the spacious porch and the second-story balconies and dormers and floor-to-ceiling windows that gave the main house the look of a baroque paddle wheeler on the Mississippi. He crossed a drawbridge and parked by a canebrake and lifted the sniper rifle from the trunk and entered an empty boathouse that had a walkway built along one wall. Across the Teche, he could see the sloping green yard of the Nightingale home and a swimming pool and a bathhouse spangled with sunlight sifting like spiritual grace through the oak limbs and Spanish moss.

Chester also carried a hand-crafted leather folder with pockets and braided borders and a bucking horse and cowboy rider stenciled on it. The folder had been given to him years ago by a friend he’d met at a state mental hygiene clinic. The friend had told Chester he’d murdered three people while hitchhiking across the country; the friend had considered Chester a man who would understand.

“You shouldn’t hurt people who give you a free car ride,” Chester had said.

“I needed their car,” the friend had said.

“Did you hurt a child? If you lie, you know what will happen.”

“I’m sorry, Chester. Don’t be mad. I didn’t hurt no kids.”

“Let’s have no more ugly talk.”

“No more. I promise.”

“That’s a good boy,” Chester had said. His nostrils were flaring, his breath out of control.

In the pouches of his folder were his index cards wrapped with a rubber band. The cards were in numerical order. Each one had a drawing on it depicting the stages of the job he had been assigned. The system never failed him. If you had no connection to the target, and if the target deserved his fate — which they all did — it was easy to walk up on the target with a smile on your face and click the off switch on the side of the target’s head and walk away. He’d done it with an ice pick to a rapist on a subway in New York City, and had covered the dead man’s face with a raincoat and sat in the next car until the train pulled in to the station and the body tumbled out of the seat.

Of course there were occasions when he did it in self-defense, when people decided he was a half-grown man they could tease and torment, like the two drug dealers in Algiers or the deputy who gave him a bad time for simply walking down a backroad by the bayou. Chester didn’t like to think about those kinds of people. They made him grind his teeth, which were as small and rounded as pearls and loose in his gums because of the untreated abscesses that were his constant companions in the orphanage. When a dentist warned him about grinding his teeth in his sleep and his obvious need to wear a guard during the nocturnal hours, Chester told the dentist he ground his teeth in the daylight, and the dentist had better watch his greedy mouth and concentrate on keeping his fingernails clean and washing his hands after he went to the bathroom.

Chester sat down on a rolled tarp and rested the rifle across his thighs. The sun was white in the sky, the bayou a dirty chocolate color, dragonflies hanging over the cattails. A dead catfish floated upside down past the boathouse, its stomach as bloated as a softball. Then he saw a woman emerge from the back of the house. She was wearing a bathing suit that was as black as her hair; it fit her as tightly and smoothly as molded rubber. He released the box magazine from the rifle’s frame and lifted the telescopic sight to his eye. Suddenly, the face of the woman was a few feet from his. Her body was an artwork, a landscape of valleys and hills and mysterious places that yearned to be discovered and touched. He felt an erection tightening against his underwear.

She walked slowly down the tile steps into the pool, one hand gliding along the hardness of a chromium rail, the water slipping over her knees and thighs and the secret place he knew it was wrong to think about. Through the telescopic sight, he could see the sweat on her neck and the tops of her breasts, and he had to rest the rifle butt-down and clench the stock and kiss the barrel to stop his hands from shaking.

He closed his eyes and began counting backward from a hundred to make his erection go down. Inside his head, he saw himself strapped to a bed, his underwear soaked with urine, his bare chest and legs crisscrossed with welts from a switch the operators of the orphanage had made him cut for himself. Then the kindly face of someone not much older than he was appeared above him. Her loving hands unbuckled the straps and removed his soiled underwear and washed his body and stroked his forehead.

He forced himself to breathe slowly until he regained control. He wiped his saliva off the gun barrel, his desire reduced to little more than a guttering flame. He must not have impure thoughts, he told himself. They made him want to hurt people. Others enjoyed forbidden things, and he could not. The thoughts followed him around, and the more he tried to keep them out of his head, the more they enticed him. When nothing else worked, he wanted to hurt someone the way his friend the hitchhiker did, and he never wanted to be like the hitchhiker.

He waited for the quivering in his shorts to subside completely, then he dared look at the swimming pool again.

A man in a yellow bikini and flip-flops emerged from the house and walked toward the pool. A towel hung around his neck. Chester lifted the telescopic sight to his eye again. The man’s hair was peroxided, his artificially tanned torso plated with muscle, his phallus shaped like a fat banana inside the bikini. Chester put the crosshairs on the man’s face. There was something wrong with it. It was sunken in the center, the eyes and nose and mouth too small. It was a stupid face. Chester did not like people with stupid faces. He felt himself grinding his teeth again.

Naughty boy, he thought gleefully.

The man with the perfect body and stupid face dove into the pool and swam on his back. The woman joined him, then the two of them rested by the gutter in the deep end, closer than they should have been, perhaps their legs or stomachs touching. Chester fantasized about parking a big one at the base of the man’s brain. It would leave his head floating in chunks, dissolving like red smoke in the turquoise depths. Chester ran his tongue across his lips at the thought.

The woman pulled herself up on the ladder and got out of the pool, her rump dripping. She seemed very angry and shook her finger at the man clinging to the pool gutter, his face turned up to hers.

Chester wondered if the man with the stupid face had tried to put his hand somewhere he shouldn’t have. If that was true, Chester wanted to kill him. And not all at once. Bad men deserved bad things, and Chester knew how to do all of them. He began to breathe heavily again, frustrated with himself and with the restraints placed upon him. He shouldn’t have come here. Or wheeled his suitcase down the two-lane road by the bayou, thereby drawing the attention of the deputy he was forced to kill. The job and the places were always on the cards. There were no cards that showed him in a boathouse, gripping an M107 with both hands.

But these were things he had to do, whether others liked them or not. He had survived at the orphanage and on the streets of Mexican border towns where children were rented by the hour. Today he had power that he wanted to take back in time and use on all those who had exploited his little body. But that was not the way it worked. Time did not take away the pain; nor did it allow him to use his skills on people out of the past who waited for him in his sleep.

Chester got up and realized there was a wet spot the size of a quarter in his underwear. Although no one was in sight, he felt his face burning as he walked back to the car and dropped the rifle into the trunk. He drove straight to a Dairy Queen in Franklin and cleaned himself in a restroom, then sat at a wooden table in the shade and began eating a paper plate full of ice cream sandwiches.

Three teenagers sat in an SUV ten feet away, the doors open, the panels throbbing with rap.

“Turn that down, please,” Chester said.

A kid lowered the volume. “What was that?”

“That music. It hurts my ears,” Chester said.

“It grows on you,” the kid said. He turned the volume up full-blast.

Chester walked to the door of the SUV. The three kids were looking at one another and grinning, as though they intuitively knew a lifelong object of ridicule had wandered into their midst and they were free to do anything they wished to him.

“Why do you want to act smart-alecky?” Chester shouted above the roar.

“You like Dilly Bars?” said the kid in the passenger seat. “Strap on your kneepads in the restroom. I’ll bring you one.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“My father owns half this town. Now get out of here, freak.”

Chester rested one hand on the door like a lump of dough. “You shouldn’t say that to me.”

“Oh, he’s all mad now,” the kid said, forming his mouth into a pout. “He messed himself. He’s starting to cry.”

“He’s a retard,” the driver said. “Leave him alone.”

“He’s cute,” said the kid in the passenger seat. “We like you, little buddy. Want to meet some girls?”

“You’re very mean,” Chester said.

“We’re finished here,” the driver said. He leaned toward the passenger window. “You hear me? Get your hand off the door.”

When Chester didn’t move, the driver smashed his hand.

“Owie,” Chester said.

The three kids laughed.

Chester got behind the wheel of his vehicle. He started the engine but could not hear its sound and had to rest his hand on the dashboard to make sure it was running. He had entered one of those soundproof moments in his life that belonged to neither the past nor the present. The catalyst and the consequence were always the same. Contempt, ridicule, public shame, followed by his eardrums swelling so tightly he couldn’t hear, and his optical nerves popping loose from the backs of his eyes, deconstructing the external world piece by piece.

For perhaps thirty seconds, the backs of his eyelids were a red veil on the other side of which stick figures performed gross acts and fought one another with staves and staffs like the caricatures in tarot cards. It was funny how life replicated the tarot rather than the other way around. Maybe that was how thought worked. You had the thought, then the thought became the thing. That was why bad thoughts were to be avoided.

The moment passed, and the world reassembled itself, and Chester drove into the street and down to the intersection. Ten minutes later, the three boys in the SUV pulled out and drove in the opposite direction. They stopped at a girl’s house, a filling station to gas up, a street corner in a black neighborhood to score some weed, a drive-through window for daiquiris, a gun-and-ammo store to buy .22 shells. They parked by a swampy woods used as an illegal dump and took turns pocking holes in a rusted-out car body that had no engine and no glass in the windows. When they were out of shells, they got back into the SUV and Bic-fired a bong.

Chester estimated the range at eight hundred yards. With his gloves on, he loaded nine armor-piercing rounds into the box magazine, then wet the tenth round with his mouth and inserted it with the others. He braced the bipod on the car hood and sighted through the scope. Inside the SUV, the silhouettes of the boys moved back and forth like cutouts on a moving clothesline. He felt a flame lick at his loins, a hardening again in his manhood, a desire that went so deep he knew he would never satisfy it. His ears whirred with sound, his heart pounded, and just as he squeezed the trigger, he felt a dam break inside him and an orgasmic sensation flood through his body, so strong and warm and encompassing that his legs went weak.

There was no movement inside the SUV, nor any sound. The round had punched a hole just below the rear window and probably gone through the seats and the radio. Chester kept the rifle aimed at the same level and delivered four more rounds, blowing pieces of the seats and upholstery and dashboard and windshield onto the hood.

His last shot was into the gas tank. He picked up his brass and dropped it into the pockets of his baggy trousers. Before he pulled onto the asphalt, he glanced through the rear window. One of the kids had spilled onto the ground. One was running through the woods. Chester didn’t know where the third had gone. He turned up the air-conditioning until the inside of the car was frigid and the sweat on his face turned to ice. He thumbed a CD of Brahms into the stereo and took a deep breath through his nose, as though inhaling air off a glacier on the first day of creation, long before a thick-legged quadruped with fins and gills and lungs waddled out of the surf and began its agenda.