Robicheaux

Chapter 33

The storm continued through the night, filling our rain gutters with pine needles and leaves, flooding the yard and most of East Main. The Teche was high and yellow at dawn, lapping into the canebrakes and cypress knees along the banks, the sun pink and the sky strung with white clouds and patches of blue. The trees were dripping audibly and throbbing with birds. It was a grand way to start the day, in spite of all that had happened.

Helen caught me at 8:06 A.M. in the corridor outside her office. “Inside, bwana.”

“Tony Nine Ball is upset?”

“No, half of St. Mary Parish is.”

I walked ahead of her. She slammed the door behind us. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“He told Alafair she probably gave good head.”

Her face went dead. Her early days at NOPD were not easy. She was not only a woman, she was a bisexual woman. The cruelty and abuse by a detective named Nate Baxter set new standards. He ended up facedown in a plate of linguini in a family restaurant on Canal.

“I’d do it over if I had to,” I said. “Fire me if you want. Nemo is a bucket of shit who should have been poured down the honey hole a long time ago.”

She sat behind her desk and picked at a thumbnail.

“This isn’t about Nemo?” I said.

“Labiche died last night. The head nurse says you were there.”

“I was.”

“And you knew he died?”

“Yes, he died with his hand in mine.”

“And you didn’t bother to call in? Or say what you were doing there? Or what he might have said before he caught the bus?”

“What he told me won’t change anything,” I said. “I didn’t have my recorder.”

“What did he say?”

“Dartez was having an epileptic seizure, and I tried to save him. There was something in his throat. That’s about it.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s why you dragged him out the window,” she said. “He had the plastic filter of a cigar lodged in his throat.”

“That’s it. Then I think Penny came up behind me and hit me with a rock or a chunk of concrete.”

“Labiche mentioned Penny?”

“No.”

“Nothing to suggest who might have sent Penny after you?”

“I believe it was Nemo.”

“You’re probably right. This won’t get you off the hook, though, will it?”

“I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

She opened her desk drawer and took out my medal and silver chain and set them on the corner of her desk. “A nurse brought this by about fifteen minutes ago. She said you must have left it in Labiche’s hand, because nobody else was in the room with him.”

I picked up the chain and put it around my neck and dropped the medal inside my shirt. “Thanks.”

“You’re a piece of work, Pops.”

In a Seedy motel north of the Four Corners area of Lafayette, Chester Wimple sat on the side of his bed and stared at the window shade. The bottoms of his tennis shoes barely touched the floor. He wore a white painter’s cap with a long bill and a high square top, and brand-new pants that fitted his legs like buckets, and a stiff short-sleeved checked shirt, and a clip-on bow tie. When he tried to rethink the events in the Labiche house, his mouth and jaw contorted as though a puppeteer were playing a joke with his face.

He had never messed up a hit, or left loose ends, or allowed emotion to sully the virtuous nature of his work. Tidiness and cleanliness were his hallmarks. The left hand of God could not be otherwise. The words “creepy little snerd” crawled like worms in his ears.

On the bedspread were his .357, a scoped .223 carbine, a Beretta nine-millimeter — the earlier model with the fourteen-round magazine — and a World War II British commando knife, the blade double-edged, narrow, shining with an oily-blue liquidity, tapering into a dagger point. The steel was cold and hard when he picked it up and closed his palm on the handle, his lips parting, his phallus tingling inside his boxer shorts. This was the only weapon in his possession that had the personal touch, that brought him into eye contact with the target and allowed him a guilty pleasure not unlike the impure thoughts he was not supposed to have.

Yesterday he had received a new set of index cards at the general-delivery window. The drawings on each card and the names of the next targets caused him no difficulty. He did not know them or why they needed to be removed from the landscape, which, for Chester, was an antediluvian world governed by raptors and pterodactyls. The flowing calligraphy on the first card was the issue. The words seemed to contain a trap, the way words were used to trap him when he was a child. They made his eyes jitter and the window shade change from a warm yellow to a dull red that pulsed as though a fire were burning on the other side.

The note read:

She had not signed the note or even used an initial. He wanted to cry. Not out of joy, either. She did not want to see him.

He pushed the point of the commando knife into the skin behind his chin, forcing his head back until his neck ached. What if he shoved the blade to the hilt? Would it reach the brain? What was the poem she used to read to him? He could remember only pieces. Tiger! tiger! burning bright. In the forests of the night... What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?

He had thought she was talking about him and why he was different from other children.

“Oh, no, no,” she said. “You’re a good boy, Chester. This poem is about bad people, the kind who have hurt us.”

At that moment, he knew no power on earth would ever separate them.

He replaced the rubber band around the index cards and flipped through the images with his thumb. Two more targets, people he knew nothing about. What had they done? Actually, he didn’t care. If they were on the cards, there was good reason. They knew it, too. He saw the regret in their eyes before he sent them to that place where they couldn’t hurt people anymore, and he felt no guilt about their passing. He gave ice cream to children with a glad heart. That’s who Chester Wimple was.

But something else was bothering him. He was losing his objectivity, and his motivations were becoming impure. For personal reasons, he wanted to do the man with the convex face and the peroxided shoe-brush haircut and the muscles that glistened with suntan oil. The man in the pool with Emmeline Nightingale, the man whose body fluids floated in the water and touched hers. He wanted to do this man on his own, up close with the commando knife, or with a rifle from afar so the soft-nosed, jacketed round would be toppling when it keyholed through the face, all of it caught inside the cylindrical simplicity of the telescopic sight.

Chester turned on the television set and stared at cartoons for the next two hours, sitting on the side of the bed, his mouth open, his face as insentient as a bowl of porridge.

Clete was not only a member of our family, he would lay down his life for Alafair or me. Which also meant he inserted himself into situations without consulting anyone. On Tuesday, he and Homer went fishing in St. Mary Parish, then drove top-down to the movie set behind Albania Plantation. Levon and Rowena Broussard were standing behind a camera down the bayou. The actors and the crew were just breaking for lunch. Tony Nine Ball was nowhere in sight. Clete removed his porkpie hat. “My name is Clete Purcel, Mr. Broussard. Got a minute?”

“You don’t have to tell me who you are,” Levon said.

Clete put his hat back on and looked at the bayou and the hundreds of robins in the trees. “This is my pal Homer.”

“Homer Penny?” Levon said.

Homer looked at his feet.

“I’m his guardian,” Clete said. “Unofficial but guardian just the same. He’s never seen a movie set.”

Clete could hear the wind in the silence.

“How are you, Homer?” Rowena said, and extended her hand. The scars where she’d cut herself were red and as thick as night crawlers.

“Dave and Alafair Robicheaux don’t know I’m here,” Clete said.

“You’re on a mission of mercy?” Levon said.

“I was an extra and did security on a couple of films but didn’t have my name on the credits. I didn’t think you’d mind. I mean us being here and all.”

“Welcome,” Levon said.

“I wanted to ask a favor, too.”

“I never would have guessed,” Levon said.

“I have a Frisbee over there on the table, Homer,” Rowena said. “Why don’t you and I toss a couple?”

Homer looked down the slope at a row of cannons and actors in kepis and butternut uniforms. “That’d be great,” he said.

Levon waited until they were out of earshot. “You’re here about Alafair?”

“She worked hard on the script,” Clete said. “It wasn’t for the money, either.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Tell her you want her back.”

“She can come back any time she likes.”

“That’s not the same as apologizing for what happened and telling her you appreciate her work.”

Levon took out his cell phone and found a number in his contacts. His call to Alafair went straight to voicemail. “This is Levon. Tony is a jerk. I need you here, Alafair. Your script is beautiful. I don’t want amateurs messing it up. I sent you two e-mails. Call me.” He closed his cell. “Anything else?”

“I sent the Nightingale chauffeur to you. A guy named Swede Jensen. I hope you didn’t mind.”

“He’s a Confederate soldier. He’s down by the bayou now.”

“No kidding?” Clete said.

“I’d like to eat lunch and get back to work.”

“Sure,” Clete said.

“Do you and Homer want to join us?”

Clete saw a red Frisbee sail over the cannon and Homer jump in the air to catch it, his face split with a smile. “That’d be nice.”

That night the rain came again, mixed with hail and bursts of tree-lashing wind. Clete ordered in a pizza, and he and Homer watched My Darling Clementine on Clete’s television set. At the end of the film, when Henry Fonda leaves the woman by the side of the road and rides away into the Arizona wastelands, Homer’s eyes turned wet, and he looked at Clete for an explanation, either for the film or for his emotions.

“See, it’s about the fact that a guy like Wyatt Earp wouldn’t ever be able to enjoy a normal life,” Clete said.

“Clementine is so beautiful,” Homer said. “You can see the love in her eyes. It’s not right to leave her just standing by the road.”

“See, John Ford directed that film, Homer. He was always experimenting with light and shadow. The story is about good and evil. Even though all the Clantons are killed, Wyatt knows more of them are waiting out there in the wastelands. He’s the guy who has to keep the rest of us safe.”

“So maybe he’ll come back and see Clementine again?”

“You never can tell.”

Later, as Clete lay in the dark with the rain clattering on the roof, his own words brought him to conclusions about himself that he didn’t want to face. He had two kinds of dreams, one in color, one in black and white. Sometimes in his sleep, he returned to the French Quarter of the old days, when Sam Butera and Louis Prima were blowing out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, the balconies dripping with flowers along streets that seemed about to collapse in on themselves, the street bands playing for coins and the sidewalk artists setting up their easels in Jackson Square, the black kids dancing with taps as big as horseshoes clamped on their feet, the smell of beignets and café au lait in the Café du Monde, the palms and banana fronds ticking inside the gated courtyards, the arched entranceways dank and cool-smelling, the stone stained with lichen and ponded with water that resembled spilled burgundy in the shadows.

The dreams in black and white went back to an Asian country where, out there in the sweltering dark, beyond the concertina wire and the claymores and the flicker of an offshore battery, Bedcheck Charlie launched grenades randomly with a captured blooker, blowing mud, foliage, and even a sit-down shitter into the air, the detritus raining down on Clete’s poncho and steel pot. Occasionally, Bedcheck Charlie got lucky, and after the explosion, a grunt down the line would scream words at the stars that Clete did not want to attach to an image.

Sleep came to Clete only by way of surrender to a fantasy. Before he went overseas, he saw a black-and-white news film in an art theater in San Fran that showed Vietminh sappers crawling through barbed wire strung by French Legionnaires. The Vietminh wore sandals cut out of rubber tires and sweat-soaked black pajamas that looked like black oil on their skeletal frames. Their only possessions and weapons were a rice ball, a piece of fish tied in a sling on their waist, and a bamboo cylinder packed with explosives tied on their back. Without flinching, they crawled across anti-personnel mines that blew them into dog food; yet they kept coming, undaunted. Clete wondered how desperate a person would have to be in order to become so brave.

At about 0400, he would surrender to his fatigue, the eggs of a malarial mosquito humming in his blood, the sour stench of his body, the jungle ulcers on his skin, the squishiness of trench foot inside his boots, the insects that got into his socks and up his legs, the cut on his nose where his steel pot had scissored down on his face. In surrendering, he put the faces of the sappers on Bedcheck Charlie and, for a brief time, did not think of him as an enemy. Clete gave himself over to a mental opiate, and Bedcheck disappeared into a box.

Clete never spoke to others of the private universe in which he lived; nor did he share his belief that the world was mad, that most politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.

Sunrise brought heat and humidity that felt like fire ants crawling inside his utilities. The dawn also meant rice paddies filled with human feces and trails with poisonous snakes looped around tree branches and booby-trapped 105 duds and Vietnamese knockoffs of our M14 mines and Bouncing Betties that would steal your limbs and eyes or simply take you off at the waist and leave half of you to whisper your last words. In his dreams he saw all of this in black and white, never in color, and he believed the phenomenon had something to do with the distinction between good and evil. The irony was that he had never learned where the difference lay.

He woke with a start at 3:06 A.M., unsure where he was. He saw lightning outside and the silvery-green slashing of an oak limb across the window. But it was not the storm that woke him. Just before waking, he had seen an image in his mind, an incandescent wormlike creature whose heat was so bright and intense that it evaporated the rain and the darkness surrounding it.

He took his snub-nose from under his pillow and put on his slippers and unbolted and unchained the door and stepped out on the stoop in his pajamas, ignoring the rain. “Who’s out there?”

An electric light burned in a boathouse across the bayou. His Caddy was parked in the cul-de-sac, the hood and cloth top sprinkled with leaves and pine needles, the hand-waxed paint job beaded with water. In the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a figure moving through the trees, away from the motor court. Clete walked out on the gravel, rain running into his face, his pajamas sticking to his skin, the snub-nose hanging from his hand. “I saw you, pal. Come out or you might catch one in the brisket.”

No response.

“Hey, shit for brains, I know who you are,” he said.

No answer or any movement in the trees.

“You’re the guy they call Smiley,” he said. “My daughter is Gretchen Horowitz. A fuck like you is lucky to do hundred-dollar hits in Little Havana.”

None of it worked, and Clete felt foolish talking to the rain. He walked through the trees to the water’s edge, his slippers sinking in the loam. The bayou was the color of café au lait, wrinkling in the wind like shriveled skin. His hand was squeezed tight on the grips of the .38. Maybe he had imagined it all. There was no wormlike creature anywhere except in his mind, which for years had been a repository of weed and alcohol.

He walked back to the cul-de-sac and his Caddy, then saw the slim-jim stuck solidly and abandoned between the driver’s window and the door. Clete reached under the back fender and removed the magnetized metal box that held his spare key, and unlocked the passenger door and removed a small flashlight from the glove box. He went to the driver’s side and shined the light on a few footprints that seemed inconsequential, then opened the car door with the key and searched the floor.

Nothing.

He pulled the slim-jim from the window and began searching the ground. Again nothing. Or almost nothing. Just as he clicked off the light, he saw a glimmer in the grass. He clicked the light on again and stooped down and touched a small glass tube with the flashlight’s case. It was a mercury tilt switch, probably homemade.

He went back into the cottage and pulled off his pajamas and dried off with a towel and put on clean clothes and wrote a note for Homer. Then he tore up the note and sat in a stuffed chair and stared out the window until daylight, when the rain thinned into rings on the bayou and fog bumping in thick clouds amid the tree trunks. When he thought of the glass tube’s implications, his shingles flared like a nest of heated wires between his shoulder blades, and the remnants of his undigested supper spilled into his mouth.