Robicheaux

Chapter 34

He pulled in to my driveway at seven A.M., when I was feeding Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon on top of Tripod’s hutch. I fixed a pot of coffee and took it and two tin cups out to the redwood table in the backyard and filled our cups, waiting for him to explain why he had come to my door.

Clete’s face was a complex study, particularly during times of crisis or decision. The more intense the emotion, the more silent and withdrawn he became. The pattern never changed. He breathed evenly through his nose, his green eyes fixed on a hologram no one else saw. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes flattened and turned the color of papier-mâché, his forehead turning as cool as marble, the blood settling in his cheeks because it had nowhere else to go.

“Had an early visitor this morning,” he said. “In the middle of the storm.” He hooked a finger through the handle on the cup. The coffee was black and scalding hot, a wisp rising from it like a trail of cigarette smoke. He drank from the cup a sip at a time, then swilled half of it, swallowing with no discomfort.

“What happened?” I said.

“Somebody tried to put a bomb in my car.”

“You saw somebody around your car with a bomb?”

“I went outside before he could finish jimmying the window. He ran off.”

“How do you know he had a bomb?”

“I found a tilt switch in the grass next to the driver’s door.” He saw the confusion in my face. “It’s a glass tube that’s got mercury in it. It’s attached to the brake pedal or the accelerator. When the driver presses down on the pedal, the tube tilts and creates the electrical connection that detonates the charge.”

“You saw the guy?”

“He took off. If I hadn’t woken up, he probably would have killed me and Homer. We go down to McDonald’s in the morning for biscuits and eggs.”

“Do you have the tube?”

He nodded. “I think it’s this guy Smiley. I told him that.”

“We’ll get everything to the lab.”

“Waste of time. The guy’s a pro. One of two guys sent him.”

I knew where we were going. “You don’t know it was Smiley. Don’t start making connections.”

“He’s out-of-town talent. He’s working for Fat Tony or Jimmy Nightingale. They both have the same motivation.”

“Like what?”

“Tony thinks he’s hit the big time in Hollywood. Nightingale is about to become an international figure. They’re leaving their baggage in the depot.”

But I knew Clete’s thought processes had not reached their destination.

“It’s Nightingale,” he said. “His shit-prints are on all of this.”

“Okay, he’s the Antichrist of St. Mary Parish,” I said. “You made your point. But the evidence that he’s hired a killer isn’t there. Tony Nemo hires killers. Rich guys like Jimmy hire lawyers.”

“Jimmy?”

“Nightingale,” I said.

“Right.” Clete refilled his cup and wrapped his hand around it and lifted it to his lips, then set it down without drinking. “I didn’t come here to tell you about my suspicions. You’re my friend, and I got to be up front with you about something.”

I felt the moisture in my mouth dry up, even the taste of the coffee disappear.

“The guy who sent the bomber after me didn’t care if he killed Homer or not,” Clete said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Tony Nine Ball or that punk in St. Mary Parish, the guy behind this is going off the board.”

“I didn’t hear that. You didn’t say it. That thought never crossed your mind.”

“I’m going to cap him, Streak.”

I took the tin cup from his hand and threw the coffee on the ground. “We’re done.”

“What would you do if it was Alafair?” he said. “Think about it. What would you do?”

Late that night, a pizza scooter pulled in to the driveway of a rented nineteenth-century home outside Jeanerette, and a short man in a stiff hat with a big bill got out with a pie box and looked around as though unsure of the address. The house was set back from the street and dark with shadow except for a light in the bathroom. A tall figure walked out of the driveway and confronted the delivery man. There was a brief exchange, then the tall figure disappeared and the delivery man climbed the steps to the gallery and twisted the bell.

The man who answered was wearing a brocaded royal blue silk robe. His body was shaped like a pile of inner tubes. “What’s this?”

“Your pizza.”

“I didn’t order a pizza.”

The deliveryman looked at the bill in his hand. “Anthony Nemo?”

“The name is Tony. I didn’t order a pizza. Where’s Robert?”

“Who?”

“My chauffeur.”

“He’s sleeping.”

“You leave your flying saucer on the lawn?”

“He was tired. He went to sleep. Like you.” The deliveryman raised a stun gun and touched it to the center of Tony Nine Ball’s face. Tony hit the floor like a cargo net loaded with salami.

When Tony awoke, all the curtains were closed, the air-conditioning blasting out arctic levels of cold air. A toy man with lips as red as a clown’s was sitting on a chair two feet from him, staring at him with a silly smile. Tony’s arms were pulled behind him.

“Hi, sleepyhead,” the man said. “My name is Chester. Do you want some pizza?”

“I can’t move.”

“You have ligatures on. So you won’t hurt yourself.”

“You almost knocked my head off. I can’t breathe. I got emphysema.”

Chester went into the bedroom and came back with a pillow. He put it under Tony’s head. “Better?”

Tony’s eyes were small and black and buried deep in his face. “You sound like Elmer Fudd.”

“Don’t be impolite. I can make you go back to sleep.”

“You’re the wack job everybody is talking about.”

Chester removed a rolled comic book from his back pocket and tapped it on Tony’s nose. “Bad, bad, bad.”

“You’re nuts. You belong in a gerbil cage. Tell me what you want.”

“Don’t make me mad.”

“My dick in your mouth, jerk-off. I got guys out there gonna take you apart no matter what happens in here.”

“No nasty talk. Not one word.” Chester tightened the comic in his grip and hammered the butt end on Tony’s nose. Tony’s face went out of shape, his eyes watering. A sound like a punctured tire wheezed from his throat. “I got to have my tank.”

“Bad boys don’t get what they want. I did some research on you. You have been very bad.”

“What the fuck is this?”

“Did Kevin Penny work for you?”

“So what?”

“He was cruel to his little boy. You knew about it. You didn’t stop it.”

“I didn’t know nothing about his personal life. You’re here from Boys Town?”

Chester’s head was throbbing like wooden blocks falling down a staircase. “I wasn’t in Boys Town. I was in a place where bad things were done to me.”

“From what I hear, you already fucked up two hits. One with the cop in New Iberia, one with Clete Purcel. Kevin Penny’s kid is living with Purcel. You were supposed to blow up the kid, too? You looking for child abusers? Go look in the mirror, gerbil boy.”

Chester’s mouth had shrunk to a stitch, his nostrils no more than tiny holes, white around the rims. He unrolled his comic book and stared at the cover. Wonder Woman was leaping across a canyon undaunted, her gold and red bodice pushing up her breasts, her blue star-spangled shorts skintight, the message in her face unmistakable. I will, Chester said inside his head.

“You’ll do what?” Tony said.

“What Wonder Woman tells me to. If I don’t, I’ll have bad thoughts and do bad things.”

“Bad thoughts? You’re an assassin who talks to a comic book. You’re a meltdown. I can get you help for that.”

Chester rolled the comic into a tight cylinder again and jammed it as hard as a stick into Tony’s eye. “You will not talk back anymore.”

Tony’s face quivered with shock. His wounded eye was watering and rimmed with a red ring.

“I never did anything to you. Somebody is using you. I’m a businessman, a movie producer. Check me out. You want to be in a movie? I’ll put you in a movie.”

“You need to be punished.”

“What do you call this?”

“Nothing,” Chester said.

He went outside and returned with a black leather bag, the kind physicians once carried. He removed a pair of needle-nose pliers and a plastic container. Tony’s face seemed to shrink and become miniaturized. “Don’t.”

Chester unscrewed the cap and fitted the pliers on Tony’s nose and squeezed. “Open wide.”

Then he poured the container of Drano down Tony’s throat, making sure not to get any on his clothes or hands.

The next morning Helen called half a dozen plainclothes into her office. She was looking out the window at the Teche as we filed in. When she turned around, it was obvious that she planned to be brief and deliver a message that cops understand but don’t talk about.

“The coroner says Nemo went out about as hard as it gets. His chauffeur is still in a coma. A passerby said he saw a man in a boxlike hat get out of the delivery wagon and talk to someone in the driveway. The ‘someone’ was probably the chauffeur: He got his eggs scrambled with a stun gun. The pizza wagon was stolen. Maybe it’s our man Smiley. Maybe not. The homicide is under the jurisdiction of St. Mary Parish.”

“That’s it?” someone said.

“It’s my belief that the same guy tried to put a bomb in Clete Purcel’s car,” she replied. “Or maybe we’ve got a tag team at work. Whoever it is, we need to cool them out. Everybody hearing me on this? We don’t get hurt. Civilians don’t get hurt. Bad guys go out of business. Everybody copy?”

There was a collective “Yes, ma’am!”

“You stay, Dave,” she said.

She waited until everyone else had gone. There was a solitary red rose in a slender glass vase on her desk. “This is eating my lunch.”

“Don’t let it,” I said.

“We’ve got a guy killing people all over Acadiana, and we don’t know his name. We don’t have prints or weapons; all we have is two casings from the Cajun Dome that were wiped clean. Nobody is that good.”

“Nothing more from the feds?”

“They’ve heard of a guy working out of Miami named Smiley. They don’t know any more than we do.”

“Maybe we’re all looking in the wrong place,” I said. “Maybe he’s from overseas. The Mob used to bring hitters in from Sicily. They’d stay with a local family, wash the dishes, do the hit, and go back home.”

She tried to straighten the rose in the vase, then picked up a petal that had fallen on the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Her eyes seemed out of focus.

“That’s a pretty flower,” I said.

“A fellow gave it to me for my birthday. A fellow I might start seeing.”

I had no idea why she was behaving the way she was. “You okay, Helen?”

“There was a worm right in the middle of the rose. Funny, huh?”

I knew better than to say anything.

“It’s like Smiley,” she said. “He’s out there, invisible, always ready to do harm.”

“He’s just a guy, nothing more.”

She sat back in her chair, her gaze receding. “You know better.”

I wasn’t going to pursue the subject. I had known Red Cross personnel and American soldiers who had been at the liberation of Ravensbrück and Dachau. None of them was ever the same again. They also spent the rest of their lives trying to explain the nature and sources of evil. Cops fall easily into the same trap. A day comes when you see something that you never talk about again, and it lives with you the rest of your days.

“We’ll get him,” I said.

“I’m not talking about Smiley or whatever his name is. It’s something else. And I say ‘it’ deliberately.”

“Keep it simple, Helen.”

“Jimmy Nightingale is involved in this.”

“That’s not what the evidence indicates.”

“Maybe he didn’t rape Rowena Broussard, but I think he knew Kevin Penny did. Maybe he even sicced him on her.”

“We’ll never prove that, Helen. Let it go.”

“I saw him at the Winn-Dixie yesterday. People were lining up to shake his hand. He put his arm over my shoulders. I felt like I’d been molested.”

I had never heard her talk like this. “You think he’s the third Antichrist in Nostradamus?”

“No, I think he’s Huey Long on a national scale, and that scares the shit out of me.”

That night I drifted off to sleep while watching the local news. When I woke, I realized I was listening to the voice of Jimmy Nightingale. He was confessing to the satchel bombing of the Indian village in South America. There were tears in his eyes. He could have been a character actor in a medieval Everyman play. Out on the salt, he had told me the same story; I believed then and I believe now that he was at least partially contrite. But the man I saw on television that night was a man who could sell snow to Eskimos and electric blankets to the damned.

I drove to baron’s Health Club in New Iberia at five-thirty the next morning and went to work on the speed bag.

“I’m glad that’s not my face you’re hitting,” a voice behind me said.

I turned around. “Visiting with the lumpen proletariat?”

“I’ll buy you breakfast at Victor’s,” Jimmy said.

“Forget it.”

“What’d I do now?”

“I caught your performance on the news last night.”

“Performance?”

I let my hands hang at my sides, my bag gloves tight on my knuckles, the blood hammering in my wrists. I could smell my own odor. “You and I talked about that situation in South America. I thought you were genuinely sorry for the bad choice you made.”

“I like that terminology. Yeah, bad choice. It’s the kind of crap you hear in Hollywood.”

“I didn’t finish. I think you’re using the suffering of the people you maimed and killed to further your career. That takes a special kind of guy.”

“That’s pretty strong, Dave.” He rested one hand on my shoulder, even though my T-shirt was gray with sweat.

“I don’t like people touching me.”

He lowered his hand. “Take a shower. We’ll eat breakfast and talk. I always looked up to you. You know that.”

“I have to go to work.”

A kid was hitting the heavy bag, hard enough to make it jump on the chain.

“Can you give us a minute?” Jimmy said.

“Sure,” the kid replied awkwardly, as though he had done something wrong.

“Hang on, podna,” I said. “Mr. Jimmy and I are going outside.”

“I got to get to class at UL,” the kid said. “It’s all right.”

After we were alone, Jimmy said, “You look like you want to drop me.”

“You know the chief sign of narcissism, don’t you? Entitlement. That’s another word for self-important jerk.”

“I want to offer you a job. Maybe Purcel, too.”

“Doing security?”

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Arguing with me and telling me when I’m wrong. You know what LBJ said to Eric Sevareid when the two of them were watching Nixon’s inauguration on the tube?”

“No.”

“ ‘He’s made a mistake. He’s taken amateurs with him.’ I don’t want amateurs on my team.”

“I’ll start now, free of charge. Stop lying.”

“Liars own up on television to murdering defenseless Indians?”

“Hump your own pack, Jimmy. How’d you know where I was?”

“Your daughter was up. She’s back on the set, huh?”

“What about it?”

“I wish I was on it,” he said. “Hollywood is a magical place. I don’t care what people say about it.”

“Don’t tell that to your constituency,” I said.

“You think they don’t like movies? Who do you think has filled the theaters for the last hundred and sixteen years?”

He clenched his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers sinking into the flesh, fusing with the oil and sweat running out of my hair, his eyes next to mine, his breath on my skin. One of his feet stepped on top of mine. “Work with me. You can have power you never guessed at. We’ll turn the world into the Garden of Eden.”

As he walked away, I picked up a towel and wiped my face and neck and arms and hands, trying to cleanse his touch and the wetness of his mouth from my body and mind.