Robicheaux

Chapter 2

I parked my pickup on Decatur and walked across Jackson Square, past Pirate’s Alley and St. Louis Cathedral and a marimba band playing in the shade by the bookstore that used to be William Faulkner’s apartment. The day was bright and windy, cool even for March, the flowerpots on the balconies bursting with color, the kind of day in Louisiana that lifts the heart and tells you perhaps spring is forever, that the long rainy weeks of winter were nothing more than a passing aberration, that even death can be stilled by the season if you’ll only believe.

Clete’s apartment and PI office were located in a grand old building on St. Ann Street, the plaster painted a pale yellow, the ironwork on the balcony dripping with bougainvillea and bugle vine, a dry wishing well in the courtyard. Other than the vintage Cadillacs he drove, the only material possession he ever loved was his building, which may have been owned in the nineteenth century by the same woman who ran the House of the Rising Sun.

When I rounded the corner, I saw not only the building but a moving van at the curb and half of Clete’s furniture and office equipment on the sidewalk. Clete was on the sidewalk, arguing with a notorious New Orleans character named Whitey Zeroski, known as the dumbest white person in the city. When he was an independent taxi driver, he thought he’d widen his horizons and run for city council. He outfitted a pickup truck with loudspeakers and a huge sign on the roof and on Saturday night drove into a black neighborhood, blaring to the crowds on the sidewalks, “Vote for Whitey! Whitey is your friend! Don’t forget Whitey on Tuesday! Whitey will never let you down!”

He was stunned by the cascade of rocks, bricks, bottles, and beer cans that crashed on top of his vehicle.

I hadn’t seen Clete in weeks, and I missed him, as I always did when we were separated for very long. Oddly, in the last couple of years, Clete had imposed a degree of order upon his life. The scars he carried from an abusive home in the old Irish Channel and Vietnam and the romances that began passionately but always ended badly no longer seemed to be his burden. He didn’t drink before noon, laid off the weed and cigarettes, ate one po’boy sandwich for lunch instead of two, and clanked iron in a baggy pair of Everlasts in his courtyard and sometimes jogged from one end of the Quarter to the other. When he’d head down Bourbon, one of the black kids who tap-danced for the tourists would sometimes say, “Here come the pink elephant. Hope he don’t crack the cement.”

None of this stopped me from worrying about Clete and his swollen liver and his blood pressure, and the violence he inflicted upon others as surrogates for himself and for the father who had beaten him unmercifully with a razor strop. I loved Clete Purcel, and I didn’t care who knew it or what others might think of us. We started off our careers walking a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, fresh back from Indochina, the evening sky robin’s-egg blue, the clouds as pink as cotton candy and ribbed like piano keys arching over the city. We thought we’d hit the perfecta. The Quarter was alive with music and full of beautiful women and the smell of burgundy and tap beer and bruised mint in a glass of shaved ice and Jack Daniel’s. Could the world offer any finer gifts?

Since the death of my wife Molly, I wanted to see more and more of Clete, particularly in those moments when I felt as though the defining moments of my life had little application in the present, that somewhere down a deserted street a bus was throbbing at the curb, the passengers hollow-eyed and mute, unable to assimilate the journey that awaited them. Then the driver popped open the doors with a sucking sound, and I knew with a sinking of the heart that the bus was for me and I wouldn’t be returning to the city or the state I loved.

When I have those moments, I say the names of Clete and my daughter, Alafair, over and over. I have done it even in public, indifferent to the stares of others, a napkin held to my mouth or with my chin pointed down at my chest. And that’s why I resented Whitey Zeroski and his hired help or anyone else who tried to hurt the noblest man I ever knew.

“How’s tricks, Whitey?” I said.

He always looked surprised, as though someone had just stepped on his foot. He also had a habit of jerking his entire head when something caught his attention, like a meth addict or a chicken pecking in a barnyard or a man with a fused neck. He wore coveralls zipped up to his neck, the sleeves cut off at the armpits, his arms covered with hair.

“What it is, Robicheaux?” he said.

“Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing?”

“I work for the bank now. They gave me the key to Purcel’s building and the paperwork to move his belongings out on the sidewalk. He’s got another point of view on that.”

“This idiot creeped my house, Streak,” Clete said.

“What happened to your cab business?” I said to Whitey.

“Heard of Katrina?” he said.

“Don’t do this, Whitey,” I said.

“Off my back, Robicheaux. This is a legal action, here.”

“Whitey, I try to be kind to dumb Polacks, but I’m about to stuff you in the storm sewer,” Clete said.

“How about laying off the ethnic slurs?” Whitey said.

Clete looked at me and opened his hands. A pale red scar ran diagonally through his left eyebrow where he’d been hit with a pipe when he was a kid. “This is like beating up on somebody who was born brain-dead. Whitey, I apologize for calling you a dumb Polack. That’s an insult to dumb Polacks.”

Whitey’s face contorted as he tried to figure out what Clete had just said.

“Let me see the paperwork,” I said.

“It’s a reverse mortgage,” Clete said, his face coloring.

I looked at him blankly. “You didn’t?”

“I was jammed up,” he said. He had a little-boy haircut and a dimpled chin and green eyes that never faltered unless he was hiding something from me.

“We’ll get the furniture off the sidewalk,” I said. “We’ll work it out.”

“Oh, you will?” Whitey said. He had a New Orleans working-class accent, like someone whose voice box had been injected with Novocain. “What, I got nothing else to do but walk behind dick-brain here with a dustpan and a broom?”

“Shoot your mouth off one more time, Whitey, and see what happens,” Clete said.

I placed my arm across Whitey’s shoulders. “Take a walk with me.”

“What for?”

“Your helpers don’t seem to speak English. You don’t have an inspection sticker on your windshield. Your license plate isn’t current. You’re parked in a no-loading zone. You don’t have flashers. What should we do about that?”

“Give me a break here, Robicheaux.”

I took out my wallet, removed all the bills from it, and put them in his hand. “That’s about sixty dollars. Tell your boys to put everything back in the building, and buy them a round. I’ll call the bank and get this straightened out.”

“We’re supposed to live on a beer and a shot while you get me fired by the bank? I can’t wait to tell my boys this.”

“Clete never did anything to you, Whitey, but you’re making money off an unrighteous situation that’s not Clete’s fault.”

“I’ll make you a counteroffer. Wipe your ass with your sixty dollars. I’ll buy the round for the boys, and you and Purcel can haul everything back in the building. Then pour a shitload of Vaseline on it and cram it up your ass. I hope both of you get rich twice and go broke three times. I hope both of you inherit a house with fifty rooms in it and drop dead in every one of them.”

I had to hand it to him: Whitey was stand-up. I had tried to use my power wrongly to help a friend, and in so doing, I had probably put an unskilled and poor man at the mercy of an unscrupulous mortgage holder.

Clete and I spent the next two hours dragging furniture back into the building or wrestling it up the stairs into the apartment. It was four o’clock when I sat down heavily on the couch, my head swimming. Clete was in the kitchen, pouring four inches of Scotch into a glass packed with cracked ice. It was not a good moment. My defenses were down, the smoky smell of the Scotch like an irresistible thread from an erotic dream you can’t let go of at first light.

“You want a Dr Pepper?” he said, his back to me.

“No, thanks.”

“I got some cherries and limes.”

“I don’t want one.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I think I pulled something in my back.” I got up and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I took out a Dr Pepper and opened it.

“I thought you didn’t want one.”

“I changed my mind. Why didn’t you tell me you needed money?”

“It was eighty grand.”

“How much?”

“What I said.”

“You got it from a shylock?”

“I started gambling. I did pretty good at first.”

“Here?”

“Everywhere. I had a credit line in Vegas. Google has ruined private investigation. Anyway, I started losing, and I didn’t stop until I was broke and borrowing on the property.”

He took a long drink from the glass, his eyes on mine, the ice and mint and Scotch sliding down his throat. I felt a twitch in my face. “So the bank owns your place now?”

“It’s not a bank, it’s a mortgage company. They screw old people. Maybe they’re mobbed up.”

“Great choice.”

He set down the glass. The Scotch was drained from the ice. He dumped the ice into the sink. I felt myself swallow.

“Let’s go eat,” he said.

“There’s something you’re not telling me. Tony Nine Ball said you had trouble with Bobby Earl. What’s that about?”

“The problem wasn’t exactly with Bobby Earl. I almost feel sorry for the bastard. I heard the blacks were loading up on condoms his first night in Lewisburg.”

“Tony says you pissed in Earl’s car.”

“Yeah, years ago. At the Yacht Club.”

“Just recently.”

“Okay, I’m shooting craps at Harrah’s, and in come Bobby Earl and Jimmy Nightingale with this stripper who used to work on Bourbon. Except it was obvious Earl is carrying the stripper for Nightingale, or at least obvious to me, because Nightingale is a bucket of warm vomit who manipulates the subculture like it’s his private worm farm. But right now that’s not my business, and I’m simpatico at the table as long as these two assholes leave me alone. I’ve got twenty-six hundred dollars in chips in front of me, and a magic arm, and I’m rolling nothing but elevens and sevens. The broad hanging all over Earl is staring at me with this curious look, then a lightbulb goes off in her head and she says, ‘Hey, you’re the fat guy who came to my house.’ ”

Listening to a story told by Clete Purcel was like building the pyramids with your bare hands. I twirled my finger, trying to make him finish.

“Seconds earlier I felt like I owned Fort Knox,” he said. “Then I see it all draining away, like dirty water going down the lavatory. I pick up the dice and rattle them once and fling them down the felt. Snake eyes. She goes, ‘I’m right, aren’t I? You’re the guy who came around about that legal problem?’ ”

“Cletus, try to get to the point,” I said.

“Legal problem? She got busted for leaving her kid in a hot car while she was stoned and balling a couple of truck drivers in a motel room. She skipped on her court appearance and left the bondsman on the hook for ten grand. So I pass the dice, and slap Bobby Earl on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth, and say, ‘Hey, Bob, I hear you picked up another nail. If you’re on penicillin, you shouldn’t be drinking. Next time out, wear a hazmat suit or get some radioactive condoms for your flopper.’ ”

He was sitting at the breakfast table now. He yawned as though just waking up, and put two fingers into his shirt pocket for cigarettes that weren’t there. Then he blinked.

“What’s the rest of it?” I said.

“Nothing. I left. I saw Earl’s wheels. I used my slim-jim to pop his door and took a leak inside.”

“No, you’ve left something out.”

“Like what?”

“Why give Bobby Earl a hard time? Like you said, he’s pitiful.”

“He makes me ashamed I’m from New Orleans. He’s a disgrace to the city. He’s a disgrace to the planet.”

“Does Jimmy Nightingale figure in this?”

“I might have said one or two things I shouldn’t have.”

“Really?”

“He put his arm on my shoulders like we were old pals. Then he touched my cheek with the back of his wrist. Yuck. I called him a cunt and got escorted in cuffs out the front door. There were only about three or four hundred people watching.”

He cleared his throat softly, his eyes shiny.

“He’s lucky you didn’t drop him,” I said. “Those security guys, too.”

“Think so?”

“I’m proud of you, Clete.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me guiltily.

“What?” I said.

“Nightingale is part owner of the company I took the reverse mortgage from.”

Jimmy Nightingale was one of the most unusual men I ever knew. He grew up in Franklin, on Bayou Teche, and lived in a refurbished antebellum home that resembled a candlelit steamboat couched among the live oaks. Like his family, Jimmy was a patrician and an elitist, but among common people, he was kind and humble and an attentive listener when they spoke of their difficulties and travail and Friday-night football games and the items they bought at Walmart. If someone told a vulgar joke or used profanity in his presence, he pretended not to hear or he walked away, but he never indicated condemnation. In a dressing room or a pickup basketball game, his manners and smile were so disarming that it was easy to think of him as an avatar of noblesse oblige rather than the personification of greed for which the Nightingales were infamous.

Please don’t misunderstand. My description of Jimmy is not about him or the system he served but a weakness in me. In trying to be a halfway decent Christian, I put aside my resentment of his oligarchic background and accepted him as he was. Actually, it went further than that. I liked Jimmy a lot, or at least I liked things about him. I admired him and perhaps sometimes even envied his combination of composure and ardor, as well as his ability to float above the pettiness that characterizes the greater part of our lives.

He was handsome in an androgynous way, his hair bronze-colored and neatly clipped and perfectly combed, his face egg-shaped, his cheeks pooled with color, his breath sweet. Both men and women were drawn to him in a physical way, and I think many times his admirers could not explain the attraction. He probably wasn’t over five-nine and 150 pounds. But maybe that was the key to his likability. He was one of us, yet confident in a locker room or at a boxing match, and he didn’t feel a need to contend with criticism or personal insult. Jimmy used to say the only argument you ever win is the one you don’t have.

He was our man of all seasons: a graduate of military school, a screenwriter, a yachtsman, a polo player, and a performer at aerial shows. He could speak on any subject and was the escort of women who were both beautiful and cerebral, although he had never married nor, to my knowledge, ever been engaged. His self-contained manner and repressed intensity made me wonder if he didn’t belong in a Greek tragedy.

I believed Jimmy had an enormous capacity for either good or evil, and that his spirit was as capricious as a wind vane. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said no one could understand America without understanding the graves of Shiloh. I think the same could have been said of Jimmy Nightingale.

He was about to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate. If elected, he would establish a precedent. Yes, Louisiana has produced some statesmen and stateswomen, but they are the exception and not the norm. For many years our state legislature has been known as a mental asylum run by ExxonMobil. Since Huey Long, demagoguery has been a given; misogamy and racism and homophobia have become religious virtues, and self-congratulatory ignorance has become a source of pride.

I shared none of these thoughts with Clete. Instead, when I returned to New Iberia and my shotgun house on the bayou a short distance from the Shadows, I called Jimmy Nightingale’s home in Franklin. A female secretary answered and took a message. Did you ever have a conversation with a professional ice cube?

“Do you know where Mr. Nightingale is?” I asked.

“He didn’t say.”

“Is he in New Orleans?”

“I’m sure he’ll return your call very soon, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“It’s Detective Robicheaux.”

“Thank you for your call, Detective Robicheaux. Is your call in reference to an official matter?”

“I really don’t know how to define it.”

“I’ll tell him that. Good-bye.”

The line went dead.

I lit the gas stove in the kitchen and warmed a bowl of frozen crawfish gumbo. The windows were open, the curtains swelling with wind, the house creaking. The light was failing in the oak and pecan trees in my backyard. On the far side of the bayou, a man of color was sitting on a wooden chair, fishing with a cane pole and bobber among the reeds, the late sun splintering on the water. Since my wife’s accident, this had become my worst time of day. My home was cavernous with silence and emptiness. My wife was gone, and so were my pets and most of my relatives. With each day that passed, I felt as though the world I had known was being airbrushed out of a painting.

I took the gumbo off the stove and sat down at the breakfast table with a spoon and a chunk of dry French bread and started to eat. I heard a car turn in to my gravel drive, the tires clicking, and come to a stop at the porte cochere.

“Dave?” someone called.

I walked through the hallway into the living room. Jimmy Nightingale stood at the screen, panama hat in hand, trying to see inside. He was wearing beige slacks and a maroon shirt and a windbreaker with a pair of aviator glasses sticking out of the breast pocket. “How you doin’, copper?” he said.

“Come in,” I said, pushing open the door.

“My secretary called me on the cell.” He shook hands, his eyes sweeping through the house, then brightening when they came back to mine. “You look good.”

“You, too, Jimmy.”

But Jimmy always looked good. He followed me into the kitchen.

“I have some gumbo on the stove,” I said. “Or would you like a cold drink?”

“I just ate at Clementine’s. You have such a nice place here. The park is right across the bayou, huh? Tell me the truth, did my secretary give you the impression she was blowing you off? She’s like that. But she’s a class act, believe me.”

I had forgotten that Jimmy often spoke in paragraphs rather than sentences. “She was fine,” I said.

“Always the gentleman,” he said, soft-punching me on the arm. “I bet you were calling about Clete Purcel.”

“Clete’s sorry about the encounter at the casino.”

“Sprinkling his head with ashes? Using a flagellum on his back, that sort of thing?”

“Clete doesn’t mean half the things he says.”

“Finish your supper while I explain something. Come on, sit down.”

That he was inviting me to sit down in my own house didn’t seem to cross his mind. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed and opened his eyes as though fatigued. “I flew a biplane today and got a little sunburned. Ever go up in one?”

I shook my head.

“I wish I could have been in the Lafayette Escadrille. Dancing around the skies of France and Belgium, giving the Red Baron a tap or two with the Vickers.”

“War is usually interesting only to people who haven’t been to one.”

“You should have been a funeral director, Dave.”

“Clete says you own the mortgage on his house,” I said.

“I own part of a lending company that does. He thinks I’m having him evicted because of a little incident at a craps table?”

“Are you?”

“I forgot it two minutes after it was over.”

“People call you a cunt in public with regularity?”

“Wow, you know how to say it.”

“Cut him some slack, Jimmy.”

Then he surprised me. “I’ll look into it. If there’s something I can do, I will.”

“I have your word?”

“I just gave it to you.”

I forgot to mention Jimmy was a very good baseball pitcher, both in the American Legion and in college. His best pitch was the changeup, when you hold the ball in the back of your palm and leave the batter swinging at empty space.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You getting along all right? Since the accident?”

“I don’t talk about it much.”

“I understand.”

He gazed through the back window. The lawn was deep in shadow, the air tannic and cold, the ground strewn with yellow leaves spotted with black mold. The door hung open on the hutch that once housed our pet coon, Tripod, the wood floor clean and dry and empty. “I love your place,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s out of another era. A more innocent time.”

“Why do you pal around with a shitbag like Bobby Earl?”

“The eyes of God see no evil,” he replied.

“I’ve always envied people who know the mind of God.”

“I’ll call you by the end of business tomorrow on that mortgage situation. Can you do me a favor?”

I waited.

“This novelist who lives up the Teche on Loreauville Road, you know him?”

“Levon Broussard?” I said.

“That’s the baby. How about an introduction?”

“You need me for that?”

“I hear he’s a little eccentric and his wife got kicked off a spaceship.”

“You’re the second unlikely person to say something to me today about the Broussard family. The other was Tony Nemo. Is that coincidence?”

“You know what they say at meetings. Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.”

“I didn’t know you were in the program.”

“I’m not. I go for the dialogue. It’s great material.”

“I’ll ask Levon if he wants to have dinner with us.”

Jimmy made a snicking sound in his jaw. “That’s my man. Make it soon, will you? I really dig the guy’s work. I’m going to get a shotgun house just like this. See you.”

He tapped me on the shoulder with his hat and went out the door. Jimmy kept it simple.