Robicheaux

Chapter 28

Helen came into my office on Tuesday morning. She had just gotten back from the sheriff’s department in St. Mary Parish. She told me of the shooting.

“None of the boys were hit?” I said.

“That’s what’s peculiar,” she said. “The shooter clustered five rounds below the rear window and put one in the gas tank. Why didn’t he riddle the whole vehicle if he was out to do maximum damage?”

“How far away was he?”

“Far enough that the boys never saw him. By the way, ‘boys’ isn’t a good term for these guys. They’re walking promotions for Planned Parenthood.”

“No brass?”

“Just tire tracks,” she said. “They may belong to a stolen car that was found in Des Allemands.”

“You think this is our guy?” I asked.

“He was obviously using a high-powered military rifle and probably firing armor-piercing rounds.”

“The kids don’t have any idea who was shooting at them or why?”

“They say a weirdo guy was yelling at them at the DQ.”

“About what?”

“Their radio was playing rap. That was a couple of hours before the shooting. I don’t think they were just playing rap, either.”

“They wised off?”

“Who knows? They’d drown in their own shit if they ever left St. Mary Parish,” she said.

“What kind of car was the guy at the DQ driving?”

“They just remembered it was green. Like the stolen one in Des Allemands.”

“Any latents?”

“The owner’s,” she said. “You think the shooter just wanted to scare the hell out of them?”

“He parked one in the tank.”

“Maybe he didn’t want them coming after him,” she said.

“Or he wanted to burn them alive,” I said.

“No, I think our boy lost control and went outside his parameters. Like somebody rolling the dice and shutting his eyes. Charlie Manson claims he never killed anyone. That’s because he got somebody else to do it.”

I said earlier that Clete Purcel was the best investigative detective I ever knew — but Helen Soileau was a close second.

“What did the guy at the DQ look like?” I asked.

“Chubby buttocks. A lisp. The kind of guy who hangs around playgrounds.”

“I think these kids have sexual problems of their own,” I said.

“Before they got into it, they said the guy was smiling at everybody in the DQ, particularly at children.”

“The kind of guy somebody might call Smiley?”

“I think this baby is back in town and ready to rock,” she replied.

Sometimes it is hard to explain to outsiders the culture of southern Louisiana and the quandary of many of its people. The world in which they grew up is now a decaying memory, but many of them have no place in the present. I know Cajuns who have never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace. There are people here who cannot add and subtract, cannot read a newspaper, and do not know what the term “9/11” means. Over forty percent of children are born to an unwed mother. In terms of heart and kidney disease, infant mortality, fatal highway accidents, and contaminated drinking water, we are ranked among the worst in the nation. Our politicians are an embarrassment and give avarice and mendacity a bad name.

So how do you get angry at someone who was born poor, speaks English so badly that she’s unintelligible to outsiders, has the worldview and religious beliefs of a medieval peasant, cleans houses for a living if she’s lucky, and is obese because of the fat-laced bulk food she feels thankful for?

The temperature had hit ninety-eight degrees at four in the afternoon. The humidity was eye-watering and as bright as spun glass, as tangible as lines of insects crawling on your torso and thighs. At sunset, lightning pulsed in the clouds over the Gulf, but no rain fell, and the wind was dry and hot and smelled of road tar and diesel fuel. I walked down to the bayou and watched the sun shrink into an ember between two black clouds and disappear. Then the wind died and the trees stood still, and the surface of the bayou quivered in the sun’s afterglow, as though a molecular change were taking place in the water.

It’s a phenomenon that seems unique to South Louisiana, like a sea change, as if the natural world is reversing itself and correcting an oversight. The barometer will drop unexpectedly, the bayou will swell and remain placid at the same time, and suddenly, rain rings will dimple the surface from one bank to the other. Fish sense the change in barometric pressure and begin feeding on the surface in anticipation of the rain that will wash food from the trees into the stream or swamp.

The wind sprang to life just as a solitary raindrop struck my face. I went back into the house to get Alafair. “Come outside.”

“What’s going on?” she said.

“It’s actually raining. Let’s walk down to Clementine’s for dessert.”

She was writing in longhand at her worktable, a flat-sided oak door I had nailed onto sawhorses. She looked out the window. The light was almost gone, and leaves were scattering across the yard, and Mon Tee Coon was standing stiff-legged on top of Tripod’s hutch, his nose pointed into the wind. “Wonderful,” Alafair said, and capped her pen.

As we stepped out onto the gallery, we saw a short, stocky woman in a dark dress walk at an angle across Main, carrying a hand-lettered sign, undaunted by the whir of the automobile tires whizzing past her. Her shoulders were humped, the muscles in her calves shaped like upside-down bowling pins, her expression as angry as an uprooted rock. The sign read “D. Robicheaux killed my husbon and was let free. How my family going to live?”

“Let me talk to her, Dave,” Alafair said.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

My expression of confidence was vanity. There in the dying light, trapped in her own rage and madness and the heat radiating through the soles of her cheap shoes, her hair tangled wetly on her face, raindrops spinning down from the stars above oak trees planted by slaves, dredged out of a sixteenth-century mob armed with pitchforks and rakes, Mrs. T. J. Dartez had persevered through time and history and the elements and brought her war to my doorstep and, worse, confronted me again with the bête noire I could not exorcize from my life. I tried to place my hand on her arm.

“Don’t touch me, you,” she said. “Liar. Killer. Fite putin.”

“Don’t be talking about my mother, Ms. Dartez,” I said.

“I seen the preacher at our church. He said I got to forgive. ‘Not Detective Robicheaux, I don’t.’ That’s what I tole him, yeah. Ain’t nothing in the Bible say we got to forgive evil. And that’s what you are.”

“I didn’t kill your husband.”

“How you know that if you say you was so drunk you didn’t know what world you was in. My man was sick. He didn’t have no money for his prescriptions. He couldn’t protect hisself.”

“What prescriptions?”

“For his epilepsy. His truck was ruint, and he couldn’t work ’cause of the accident and ’cause the insurance company wouldn’t give him no money.”

“That’s not true, Ms. Dartez,” Alafair said.

“You stay out of it, you.”

“Let us drive you home,” I said.

“I ain’t taking no favors from y’all. God gonna get you, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m gonna stay out here all night. Then I’m gonna stay out here all day tomorrow.”

“No, you will not,” I said.

“You ain’t gonna boss me, no.”

“I wouldn’t try to do that,” I said. “I think you’re a good lady, Ms. Dartez. I think someone used your husband to bring me harm.”

“It was you,” she said. “It’s all been you.”

“No, ma’am, it’s not me,” I said.

A raindrop struck her forehead and ran through one eyebrow and across her nose like silver thread. But she never blinked, and she did not try to wipe the water from her face. “Why you done this to me? I ain’t got nothing except two hungry kids, me.”

I put a hand on each of her shoulders, whether she liked it or not. “My wife Annie was murdered. So was my mother. My father was killed by an oil-well blowout that shouldn’t have happened. I know what it feels like to be treated badly by the world. That is why I would never deliberately hurt you or your husband. Look into my face and tell me I’m lying.”

“I ain’t got to do nothing you say.”

“No, you don’t. But what does your conscience tell you? Forget about the preacher at your church, good man that he might be; forget about me; forget about every other person in the world except you and your children and your own idea of God. What does your conscience tell you?”

She faltered. “I ain’t sho’.”

“No, tell me, Ms. Dartez. Tell me now.” I squeezed her shoulders tighter. Tears were welling in her eyes. She shook her head.

“Say it.”

“You’re telling the troot’.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She dropped the sign on the grass. “What am I gonna do, suh?”

“Whatever it is, Alafair and I will help you with it.”

She buried her face into my chest, her hands at her sides. I could feel the wetness coming through my shirt.

“I’ll be inside,” Alafair said.

“You okay, Ms. Dartez?” I said.

“No, suh, I ain’t. I ain’t never gonna be okay. Never, never, never.” She ground her forehead deeper into my chest, into the bone.

Considering the hand she’d been dealt, who would take her to task?

At noon on Wednesday, Clete was about to go across the street to Victor’s Cafeteria when a midnight-blue Buick with tinted windows pulled to the curb and a chauffeur in gray livery got out and looked across the roof at Clete and said, “Got a minute, Mr. Purcel?”

Peroxide hair, dented-in face, shades, flat stomach, concrete deltoids, scar tissue around the eyes, a half cup of brains. Where had he seen him before?

“You’re Swede Jensen. You parked cars at the casino.”

“You got a good memory,” the chauffeur said. “I work for Ms. Nightingale now.”

“I’m closed till one.”

“She gave me orders. I told her you probably didn’t want to be bothered. She pissed in the swimming pool about it. How about cutting me a break?”

Clete tried to process what he’d just heard. It was impossible. “Come in and make it fast.” He went back into the office and closed the blinds. His secretary had already gone to lunch; the waiting area was empty. He sat behind his desk and opened a drawer and took out a roll of mints and put one into his mouth. He left the drawer open. A .25-caliber semi-auto lay under a notepad. Swede took a chair.

“She wants to hire you,” he said.

“So why doesn’t she come in?”

“She’s shy.”

“I’ll believe that in a minute.”

“I told her we go back.”

“We don’t go back, Swede. I remember you. That’s a long way from ‘we go back.’ ”

“This is my meal ticket, Purcel.”

“Before Tony Nine Ball got you a job parking cars, you were a porn actor in that studio out on Airline Highway.”

Swede took off his shades and pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes were blue, one of them defective, as if there were an ice chip in the lens. “I took a pinch for a lewd act with a minor. I had to wait eight months in jail to go to court. The charges got dropped. You want me to leave, that’s fine with me.”

“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 degenerates 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.