Robicheaux

Chapter 29

Few people understood Clete. As simple-minded people are wont to do, they put him into categories. He was a compulsive gambler, a disgraced cop who’d flushed his career with weed and booze, a mercenary who should be considered a traitor, a lover of women who belonged in straitjackets, a human wrecking ball, a child in a man’s body, a rum-dum living on yesterday’s box score, a former leg-breaker for the Mob, and most realistically, a dangerous, war-damaged man whose unpredictable moods could lay waste to half a city.

But as with all simple-minded and dismissive people, they were wrong. And not only were his detractors wrong, none of them could shine his shoes. Clete was one of the most intelligent people I ever knew, and one of the most humble, less out of virtue than his inability to understand his own goodness. He was so brave that he didn’t know how to be afraid. In the same fashion, he was generous because he cared little about money or social status or ownership, except for his Caddy convertibles. His physical appetites were enormous. So was his capacity for self-destruction. His father the milkman had taught Clete to hate himself, and Clete had spent a lifetime trying to unlearn the lesson.

The people who understood him best were usually in the life. Grifters, hookers, money washers at the track, street dips, Murphy artists, and shylocks respected him. So did uptown house creeps and old-time petemen. Button men avoided him. So did strong-arm robbers and child molesters; men who abused women or animals were terrified of him. When Clete’s anger was unleashed, he transformed into someone larger than himself. His fists seemed as big as cantaloupes, his pocked neck as hard as a fire hydrant; his arms and shoulders would split his clothes. He dropped a New Jersey hit man off a roof through the top of a greenhouse. He hooked his hand into a Teamster official’s mouth and slung him from a balcony into a dry swimming pool. He almost drowned a NOPD vice cop in a toilet bowl. He burned down a plantation home on Bayou Teche, fire-hosed a gangster across the restroom floor in a casino, pushed a sadist off the rim of a canyon in Montana, filled a mobbed-up politician’s antique convertible with concrete, went berserk in a St. Martinville pool hall and piled five unconscious outlaw bikers in a corner and would have doubled the number with a baseball bat if Helen Soileau hadn’t talked him into cuffing himself.

He was the trickster from folk mythology who flung scat at respectability. But he was a far more complicated man, in essence a Greek tragedy, a Promethean figure no one recognized as such, a member of the just men in Jewish legend who suffered for the rest of us. If there are angels among us, as St. Paul suggests, I believed Clete was one of them, his wings auraed with smoke, his cloak rolled in blood, his sword broken in battle but unsurrendered and unsheathed, a protector whose genus went back to Thermopylae and Masada.

He pulled to the curb as I was walking home from work. He was eating a spearmint sno’ball, the top of the Caddy down. “I had a talk with Emmeline Nightingale in the park today.”

“Not interested,” I said.

“Is Alafair home?”

“Probably.”

“Ms. Nightingale’s chauffeur would like a part in her picture.”

“What are you up to, Clete?”

“I thought that would get your attention. Get in.”

That’s how it worked. Clete would roll the dice, and I would get stuck with the math. I opened the door and sat back in the seat. He was wearing aviator shades and a Hawaiian shirt with hula girls on it. The sunlight through the trees was as red as a ruby on his skin. He pulled away from the curb, driving with the heel of his hand, like a 1950s lowrider.

“What’s this about the chauffeur?” I said.

“I just wanted to get you in the car. Ms. Nightingale wants to hire me.”

“Hire you?”

“She says it’s to keep Levon Broussard off her back.”

“That’s not it?”

“I think she knows I might be in a relationship with Sherry Picard.”

We bounced into my driveway. “A relationship?” I said.

“Yeah, we got it on. I’m seeing her tonight.”

“Leave out the particulars. What in God’s name are you doing?”

“There you go again.”

“I just asked a question. You can’t take care of yourself.”

“That’s it. No matter what I say, you’re on my case. I’m too old. I should put my stiff one-eye in a safe-deposit box. I drink too much. I eat the wrong food. How about respecting my space for a change?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I worry about you.”

“Remember how you used to bounce your stick on the curb in the Quarter? Everyone thought you were signaling me about a crime in progress. You were telling me to meet you at the Acme for a dozen on the half shell.”

“We’ll do it again, too,” I said.

He swallowed the rest of his sno’ball, a green ribbon running from the corner of his mouth when he smiled. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”

“You really offered to help the Nightingale chauffeur with Alafair?”

“He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, although I got the feeling he’s porking Ms. N., the way they look at each other and all.”

“Why do you think she’s interested in your relationship with Sherry Picard?” I said.

“Maybe she wants to make sure Broussard goes down for the Kevin Penny homicide.”

“You think she could have done Penny?” I said.

“Ever look into her eyes? Two inkwells, midnight blue. She has antifreeze for blood.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I think Jimmy Nightingale killed Penny or had it done.”

“I don’t think you’re entirely objective, Cletus.”

“You’re right. I’d love to bust a cap on that guy.”

“Why does he get to you?”

“He scares me. I can’t shake the feeling.”

Ever have conflict with the concept of mercy? I’m talking about those challenges to our Judeo-Christian ethos that require us to forgive or at least not to judge and to surrender the situation to a Higher Authority. That’s badly put. The challenge is not the venerable tradition. The real issue lies in the possibility that the person to whom you’re extending mercy will repay your trust by cutting you from your liver to your lights.

That’s why I hated to be in the proximity of Spade Labiche. There was an accusatory neediness in his face, a baleful light in his eyes, as though others were responsible for his lack of success and the monetary gain and happiness that should have been his. Friday morning, he opened my door without knocking. “Can I throw up on your rug for a minute?”

How about that for humor?

“I’m pretty busy, Spade.”

He looked over his shoulder. “I got to talk to somebody. How about it, Robicheaux? You know the score, man. Not many people around here do.”

“Come in.”

“Thanks,” he said. He sat down in front of my desk and lit a cigarette.

“Not in the building, partner.”

“I forgot.” He mashed out the cigarette on the inside of my trash basket and let the butt fall on top of my wastepaper. There was a razor nick on his jawline and one under his left nostril. I could smell cloves on his breath. “What’s the update on this guy with the cannon that blows heads off at eight hundred yards?”

“There isn’t any.”

His face looked like a white prune. “No prints, no brass, no feds involved, no guesses about the identity of the shooter?”

“Nope.”

“Look, I knew people in Miami who had a couple of hotels rigged to set up congressmen and business types out for a good time. The skanks would be in the bar and get these guys juiced up and in front of a hidden camera that would film stuff you couldn’t buy in Tijuana. They’d squeeze these poor bastards for years. They had a perv working them, a guy they called Smiley. He never took a pinch, not for anything.”

“What kind of perv?”

“He gets off on splattering brain matter, that kind of perv.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I think my number is up,” he said. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “It’s a feeling you get. It’s like malaria or rheumatic fever. You feel sick all over and can’t shake it. I tried to tell you this before, man. You wouldn’t listen.”

“The first time I went down a night trail, I couldn’t stop my teeth from clicking,” I said. “A kid on point hit a trip wire and was screaming in the dark. We had to go after him. There were toe poppers all over the place. I didn’t think I could make myself walk through them. Then an old-time line sergeant whispered something to me I never forgot: ‘Don’t think about it before you do it, Loot, and don’t think about it after it’s over.’ What’s this dog shit about a sex sting in Miami?”

He pressed a hand against his stomach, grimacing. “I think I got an ulcer.”

I opened my drawer and threw him a roll of TUMS. “Catch.”

“You’re a coldhearted man.”

“This perv named Smiley is going to take you out?”

“People think I know things I don’t. I was in vice. You know what that means. I dealt with twenty-dollar whores and dime-bag black pukes. The average IQ was minus-ten.”

“You took juice from Tony Nine Ball?”

“Not juice. Tony’s associates had some stuff on me. So I cut their guys some slack a couple of times. Possession charges, nothing else. In Miami, not here.”

“What stuff?”

“Those cameras I mentioned in the hotels? There was this one working girl I thought was on the square. They got me good on the video. I was married.”

“Why is it I feel like you’re telling half of something?”

“I want to be a good cop. I’m seeing this Cajun girl, Babette. You know her. At the bar-and-grill. She’s a nice girl.”

“You’d better treat her as one.”

“Lay off it. I’m hurting enough. I’ve been hitting the sauce a little too hard. I know you’re A.A. I thought I could go to a meeting with you.”

I brushed at my nose. “You don’t need me to do that.”

“Like get lost?”

“The hotline is in the phone book. Dial them up.”

“Forget I came in here. That guy out there. I got a funny feeling about why he’s here. I mean the real issue.”

I leaned back in my chair and spun my ballpoint on the ink blotter. “What feeling is that?”

He squeezed his temples, his eyes crossing. “He’s got a list of people to pop. Jimmy Nightingale is one of them.”

“What do you base that on?”

“Nightingale is too smart, and he knows too much. He’s also got a reputation for shitcanning his friends after he gets what he wants. Don’t you get it? These people are like a bunch of scorpions in a matchbox. They kill each other all the time. Why should they care about us? They use us and throw us away.”

I had never seen a man more tortured by his own thoughts.

“You’re just going to stare at me and not say anything?” he asked.

“I think you need to talk to a minister or a psychiatrist, Spade.”

“I could have been your friend. Except you don’t want friends. You’re a hardnose. You think everybody has to cut it on their own.”

“Take it somewhere else, partner.”

He stood up. His skin was gray, the way people’s faces look when they see the grave. “I need help.”

I hated what I had to do. I wrote my cell phone number on a memo slip and handed it to him. “There’s a meeting at seven o’clock. I can pick you up.”

He crunched the memo slip and bounced it on my desk. “I’ll stick with drinking. I may get popped, but I’m not going to crawl. I’ll still be me, for good or bad. What will you be? A big fish in a dirty pond.”

“You said Jimmy Nightingale knows too much. Too much about what?”

“How Frankenstein works,” he replied. “What’d you think?”

I thought that, one way or another, my life was moving away from the night T. J. Dartez died. I was wrong. Sleep is a mercurial mistress. She caresses and absolves and gives light and rest to the soul in our darkest hours. Or she fills us with fear and doubt and disjointed images that seem dredged out of the Abyss. If you’re a drunk, she can instill memories in you that may be manufactured. Or not. And clicking on a bedside lamp will not rid you of them; nor will the coming of the dawn. They take on their own existence and feed at the heart the way a succubus would.

In the dream, I saw the face of Dartez behind the window of his truck, illuminated by the passing headlights of a vehicle on the two-lane. His mouth was red and twisted out of shape, a rubbery hole trying to make sound. His forehead struck the glass. Then I was grabbing him and pulling him through the window, his body thrashing. I came down on him with all my weight, reaching with my fingers for his face. Was I trying to gouge his eyes, to drive a thumb deep into a socket, to break his windpipe?

I woke shaking and sat on the side of the bed in the moonlight. I had never had such a bad dream except for the ones I’d brought back from overseas. Alafair stood in the doorway, backlit by a red light on a clock flashing in the hallway.

“I heard you talking,” she said.

“What was I saying?”

“ ‘Don’t fight.’ Then you said something in French. Maybe ‘Que t’a pre faire? Arrêt!’”

“ ‘What are you doing? Quit!’ ”

“I can’t be sure.” Her eyes were full of sorrow. “It’s almost dawn. You want me to fix you something to eat?”

“I think I’ll go back to sleep. It was just a dream.”

“About the war?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t lie to the only people you can count on.”

“Okay, Alf.”

“I’m going to get back on my manuscript. Try to sleep.”

“Don’t get close to Tony Nemo.”

“He comes around the set. Nobody pays attention to him.”

I lay back down on the pillow. “See you later, Alfenheimer.”

She closed the door. I stared at the ceiling, afraid to sleep again.

I knew it would happen. Sunday morning, I saw Babette Latiolais outside the church I attended. The church was located in a mixed-race neighborhood, one of windmill palms and small frame houses with tin roofs and yards that had no fences. She was wearing a pillbox hat that looked dug out of an attic, and a pink suit that probably came from a secondhand store. She saw me out of the corner of her eye and quickened her step in the opposite direction.

I caught up with her. “You’re not going to say hello, Miss Babette?”

“Hi,” she said, not slowing.

“You in a hurry?”

“My li’l girl is by herself. I got to get some cereal, then we going to church.”

“You belong to St. Edward’s?”

“I go to Assembly of God. Why you axing me this?” She kept her face at an angle so that one side was covered with shadow.

“Can you look at me, Miss Babette?”

“What you t’ink I’m doing?”

“Look at me.”

“I got to go, Mr. Dave.”

“Who hit you?”

“Suh, please don’t be doing this. It was an accident.”

“Spade did this?”

“He was drunk. I fussed at him.”

“A man who strikes a woman is a moral and physical coward. A cop who hits a woman is the bottom of the barrel. Is Labiche at your house?”

“I don’t know where he’s at.”

“You need to file charges. We don’t want a man like this representing the sheriff’s department.”

“I ain’t going near that building. Ain’t nobody there gonna he’p me. I already taken care of it.”

“How?”

“My cousin used to be a landscaper for Jimmy Nightingale. He called Mr. Jimmy and tole him what happened. Mr. Jimmy sent a lawyer and a doctor to my house. That’s a good man, yeah.”

“Jimmy Nightingale doesn’t have any authority over the sheriff’s department.”

“He’s on our side. Ain’t nobody else ever he’ped us. Not since Huey Long ain’t nobody he’ped us.”

What do you say to that? “It was good seeing you, Babette. If I can do anything for you, you have my card.”

“I said somet’ing wrong, huh?”

“Not you. But the rest of us have. Je vot’ voir plus tarde, petite chère.”

But she belonged to a generation who no longer spoke French of any kind, even what we called français creole or français neg, and she had no idea what I was saying in either French or English.

Jimmy Nightingale was holding a rally that night at the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, and I talked Clete into going with me. The American South has a long history of demagoguery. Budd Schulberg coined the term “demagogue in denim” for his character Lonesome Rhodes, portrayed by Andy Griffith in the film adaptation A Face in the Crowd. Robert Penn Warren, who taught at LSU, won the Pulitzer for his creation of a fictionalized Huey Long in All the King’s Men. But it would be a serious mistake in perception to join Jimmy at the hip with a collection of sweaty peckerwoods and white minstrel performers who majored in getting drunk, race-baiting, quoting from the Bible, and screwing the maid.

The Cajun Dome was overflowing. Jimmy walked onto the stage ten minutes late in a white suit and cordovan boots and a dark blue shirt open at the collar, a short-brim pearl-gray Stetson gripped in his hand, as though he hadn’t had time to hang it. The crowd went wild. In front, some rose to their feet. Then the entire auditorium rose, stomping their feet and pounding the backs of the seats with such violence that the walls shook.

I thought of Hitler’s arrivals, the deliberate delay, the trimotor silver-sided Junkers droning in the distance from afar and then appearing in the searchlights like a mythic winged creature descending from Olympus.

Clete took a flask from inside his coat, unscrewed the cap with his thumb, letting it swing loose from its tiny chain. He took a hit of Jack. “I think I’m going to start my own country and secede from the Union.”

“Quiet,” I whispered.

“Fuck it,” he replied.

“There’s ladies here,” a man in front of us said.

Clete looked steadily at the back of the man’s head. “Excuse me.”

The man turned his head halfway and nodded.

Jimmy was a master. He seemed to float like a dove on a rosy glow of love and warmth that radiated from the people below. He belonged to them, and they belonged to him, like Plotinian emanations of each other. He gave voice to those who had none, and to those who had lost their jobs because of bankers and Wall Street stockbrokers and the NAFTA politicians who had made a sieve of our borders and allowed millions of illegals into our towns and cities. He never mentioned his political opponents; he didn’t have to. One boyish grin from Jimmy Nightingale could have people laughing at his challengers without knowing why, as though they and Jimmy were one mind and one heart.

Was he race-baiting or appealing to the xenophobia and nativism that goes back to the Irish immigration of the 1840s? Not in the mind of his audience. Jimmy was telling it like it is.

His adherents wore baseball caps and T-shirts and tennis shoes and dresses made in Thailand. They were the bravest people on earth, bar none. They got incinerated in oil-well blowouts, crippled by tongs and chains on the drill floor, and hit by lightning laying pipe in a swamp in the middle of an electric storm, and they did it all without compliant. If you wanted to win a revolution, this was the bunch to get on your side. The same could be said if you wanted to throw the Constitution into the trash can.

Clete took a small pair of binoculars out of his coat pocket and scanned the audience. He handed the binoculars to me. “Check out the top row, straight across.”

I adjusted the lenses. Bobby Earl was sitting against the wall, scrunched between a fat man and a woman with a barrel of popcorn propped between her thighs, the spotlights above him smoking in the haze gathering under the roof. The sloped shoulders and wan expression and crooked necktie and distended stomach were a study in despair and failure. His attention was fixed on the audience, not the stage, as though the people around him didn’t realize he was in their midst, ready to reclaim the glorious vision that was his invention, not this pretender’s.

I handed the binoculars back to Clete. “Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in America.”

“Richard Nixon must not have heard him,” Clete said.

The air-conditioning wasn’t working properly. People began fanning themselves, getting up for water or cold drinks, blotting their foreheads. I’d had enough of Jimmy Nightingale and wanted to leave, but Clete had found another object of interest with his binoculars. He stared through them at a spot by the rafters, in a corner bright and hot with humidity and motes of shiny dust.

“You got a number for security?”

“No,” I said. “What do you see?”

“A guy who looks like a smiling dildo. He’s carrying a box about four feet long and four inches wide.”

The man in front of us turned around again. He was Clete’s height, well groomed, thick-shouldered, a flag pin in his lapel, indignation branded on his face.“I’m about to have you removed.”

Clete’s eyes were round green stones. “What for?”

“You used a word about a certain female instrument.”

“How about this? Shut your fucking mouth.” Clete handed me the binoculars. “In the corner, ten o’clock.”

I looked but saw nothing. Clete took back the binoculars and looked again. “He’s gone.”

“We’ll tell security on the way out.”

The shots were rapid, two pops, then nothing. One blew apart a vase full of flowers by Jimmy’s foot; the other hit the staff of an American flag, cutting it in half, toppling the flag on a plastic bush. Hundreds of people ducked under the seats; some ran. Jimmy didn’t move. Instead, he detached the microphone from the stand and raised his left hand in calming fashion. “It’s all right, friends. Do not panic. I’m fine. Look at me. They can’t stop us. Do you hear me? Sit down. We’re the people. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come can separate us from the love of God.”

The response was thunderous, on the level of an earthquake, an exorcism of fear and even mortality itself, an affirmation that the man they had chosen was indeed the apotheosis of all that was good. I opened my badge and held it high above my head and, with Clete behind me, began working my way up the stairs on the far side of the building. The entire audience was on its feet and shouting incoherently. Down below, the spotlights glowed on Jimmy’s white suit with an iridescence just this side of ethereal.