Robicheaux

Chapter 35

All day I was troubled by thoughts about Jimmy Nightingale. And Levon Broussard. And the way Kevin Penny and Tony Nine Ball and Spade Labiche had gone out. I have always believed there is no mystery to human behavior. We’re the sum total of our deeds. But that wasn’t the way things had been working out.

I was fairly certain Labiche had been on a pad for Tony and was told to set up a situation with T. J. Dartez that would put me either in prison or on the injection table. Other than that, I had no idea who’d killed Penny or who was pulling the strings on the surreal hit man known only as Smiley.

At the center of it all were Jimmy Nightingale and his foil, Levon Broussard. I suspected an analyst would say both of them had borderline personality disorder. Or maybe a dissociative personality disorder. Unfortunately, those terms would apply to most drunks, addicts, fiction writers, and actors.

Both men descended from prominent families in a state where Shintoism in its most totalitarian form was not only a given but most obvious in its sad influence on the poor and uneducated, who accepted their self-abasing roles with the humility of serfs. But there was an existential difference between the two families. For the Nightingales, manners and morality were interchangeable. For Levon Broussard and his ancestors, honor was a religion, more pagan than Christian in concept, the kind of mind-set associated with a Templar Knight or pilots in the Japanese air force.

For the Broussards, honor was a virtue that, once tarnished, could never be restored. They may have been aristocrats and slave owners who lived inside a fable, but they still heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux and accepted genteel poverty and isolation if necessary but would be no more capable of changing their vision of the world and themselves than Robert E. Lee could have become a used-car salesman.

That was why I had a hard time believing that Levon could have tortured and murdered Kevin Penny. I had even greater difficulty believing he would throw in his lot with Tony Nemo in order to weigh the balance in his upcoming trial in Jefferson Davis Parish.

On Monday morning, I got a call at my office from Sherry Picard. “I need your help,” she said.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, trying to suppress my feelings about Clete’s involvement with younger women in general and this one in particular.

“Catch you at the wrong time?”

“Not at all.”

“I still have prints from the Penny homicide scene that I believe are significant. The fast-food trash. Penny kept the area around his motorcycle clean. That means the person who left it there was on the property the day Penny died.”

“What does this have to do with me?” I said.

“I want to fingerprint the Nightingale employees. I’m not getting anywhere.”

“St. Mary Parish was teleported from the fourteenth century. Historians come from far away to study it.”

“Did I do something to offend you?”

“I can’t help you in St. Mary.”

“How about with Levon Broussard?”

“What about him?”

“I want to fingerprint his wife. I think she may have been an accomplice.”

“I’m not convinced Levon is guilty, much less his wife.” I could feel her resentment coming through the phone. I tried again. “What makes you suspicious about his wife?”

“Her general attitude. I think she needs a flashlight shined up her ass.”

How about that?

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely what?”

“That I heard you,” I said.

“What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Are you pissed off because of Clete and me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We called it off. That’s why you’ve got your tally whacker in the hay baler?”

“I’ll talk with Levon, Ms. Picard.”

“Detective Picard.”

I softly replaced the receiver in the cradle.

The phone rang three minutes later. I thought she was calling back. I felt embarrassed as I picked up the receiver and wished I hadn’t hung up on her. Surprise time.

“I heard you used to live in New Or-yuns,” a voice said. “You were a police officer in the Quarter.”

I sat up in my chair. “That’s right.”

“I had an artist friend who knew you. He painted people’s pictures in Jackson Square. He said you were an honest police officer.”

I waved my arm at a cop in uniform passing in the hallway. He looked through the glass. I pointed at the receiver. He nodded and disappeared down the hallway.

“What’s your name?” I said. “I’ll help you if I can.”

“I think you know who I am.”

“Not for sure. Are you visiting in New Iberia?”

“Some people call me Smiley.”

“That doesn’t ring bells.”

“I want to ask you a question.”

“Yes, sir, go right ahead.”

Helen was at the glass in my door now. I mouthed the word “Smiley.”

“Does the man named Purcel have a boy?”

“You mean Clete Purcel?”

“A boy lives with him?” he said.

“Clete doesn’t have a birth son, but he takes care of an orphan. Is that the boy you’re talking about?”

He cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

“You there, Smiley?”

“Yes.”

“Did you want to tell me something?”

“What’s the boy’s name?”

“Homer.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“Homer Penny is his full name.”

I waited in the silence. I had given up information I normally wouldn’t. But this situation was outside the parameters of any in my career.

“Did you try to hurt Clete, Smiley?”

“This call is a relay. It won’t help you to trace it.”

“I figured. That means we can talk as long as you want. Where’d you get your nickname?”

No answer.

“Know who your accent reminds me of?” I said. “Tennessee Williams. He said ‘New Or-yuns’ just like you. I knew him when he lived in the Quarter.”

I could hear him breathing against the mouthpiece, as though deciding whether or not to hang up. “I don’t care about him.”

“Have you been to Algiers?” I said. “A couple of bad black dudes got their grits splattered over there.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Between you and me, I think they probably had it coming. You hear anything about that?”

“They were bad to a colored lady. Her name was Miss Birdie.”

“Did you smoke these dudes?”

“Maybe,” he said. “If you’re bad or treacherous with me, I’ll smoke you, too.”

“I believe you. But I’d rather be friends with you.”

“I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he said, his voice downshifting.

“I know what you mean. There’s nothing worse than the abuse of children or animals. That’s why Clete takes care of Homer. Clete had a hard upbringing.”

“I’m sorry. Tell him that.”

“Tell Clete?”

“Yes. I didn’t know about the boy.”

“I read you loud and clear, partner. Know anything about Kevin Penny, Smiley?”

“He was a bad man.”

“You didn’t help him do the Big Exit, did you?”

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“Not me. I’m not that smart. You’re like a shadow. You come and go, and nobody has a clue. Who was your artist friend?”

“He was my friend for a while. Then he wasn’t my friend anymore.”

“Could we work out a way to communicate when both of us have more time? I’m pretty tied up right now.”

“I can come by your house.”

He had me. I could almost see him grinning. “You’re calling the shots. Did you ever hear Louie Prima and Sam Butera play at the Dream Room on Bourbon?”

“You want to know how old I am? Remember fifteen years ago when a house was torn down on Calliope and a body fell out of the wall? It had been in there long enough not to smell anymore. This man was bad to somebody who trusted him and got walled up with his paintbrushes stuffed in his mouth. He was a very bad boy. Bye-bye.”

The line went dead. I looked blankly at Helen through the glass. I had witnessed two deaths by electrocution in the Red Hat House at Angola. On both occasions I’d felt that I was watching an element in the human gene pool for which there was no remedy, and I mean the desire to kill, either on the part of individuals or the state. I took a Kleenex from a drawer in my desk and cleared my throat and spat in it, then dropped it into the waste can.

At noon, I took Clete to lunch at Bon Creole out on East St. Peter Street. We ordered fried-oyster po’boys and sat at a table under a blue-and-silver marlin mounted on the wall.

“You couldn’t make the trace?” he said.

“The signal was probably relayed off two or three towers,” I said.

“You checked out the story about the artist in the wall?”

“His name was Pierre Louviere. Evidently, he was an eccentric guy who hung out with a weird crowd in the Quarter.”

“How’d he go out?”

“Not easy.”

“You think Smiley did Penny?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He would have said so. He doesn’t have any guilt about the people he kills.”

“Psychopaths lie for the sake of lying,” Clete said.

“He was obviously bothered about putting a bomb in a car that would kill a child.”

The waitress put our food on the table. She looked uncomfortable, obviously having overheard our conversation.

“Don’t pay attention to us,” I said.

She tried to smile but had a hard time with it. She walked away, blinking.

“Go on,” Clete said to me.

“I think Smiley feels he got set up.”

“No idea who he’s working for?”

“None. Sherry Picard called.”

Clete looked at a place six inches from the side of my face. “Yeah?”

“She said y’all aren’t hanging out anymore.”

“It’s more like she flushed me. No big deal.”

Right. I avoided looking at his eyes. He put a cracker into his mouth and chewed. He hadn’t touched his sandwich.

“She’s off the wall, Clete.”

“I’m old, she’s young. You warned me. End of subject.”

“Age is not a factor. She has the grace of a chain saw.”

Wrong choice. Three things about Clete Purcel: Since I’d first met him, he’d never once used God’s name in vain; referred to a woman in a profane way; or criticized a woman who’d dumped him, unless you counted the postcard he sent me from El Sal when he skipped the country on a murder beef and asked me to tell his ex, who’d cheated on him, that he wanted her to have the toothbrush he’d left in the bathroom.

He wadded up a napkin and lobbed it into a trash can by the cold-drink dispenser. “Smiley say anything about Jimmy Nightingale?”

“No. But I had a strange experience with Jimmy at Baron’s Health Club.”

“Like what?”

“I was hitting the speed bag and pretty sweaty and dirty. He squeezed the back of my neck and whispered in my ear. He was standing on my foot.”

Clete’s gaze went away from mine, then came back. “He’s AC/DC?”

“He was talking about making the world into the Garden of Eden.”

“You’re making this up?”

“Jimmy isn’t the same guy I used to know,” I said. “But that’s not what bothers me. I couldn’t scrub his touch off my skin. Helen said the same thing about him.”

Clete looked into space. “I think I’m going back to the Big Sleazy for a few days. Start putting junk in my arm, hanging out at bottomless clubs, go to a Crisco party at a steam room, do something healthy for a change.”

“It’s not funny, Clete.”

“None of this is,” he replied. “I didn’t give you the whole gen on Sherry. She called one of her sniper targets a sand nigger. She tried to take it back, but it made me think about her relationship to Kevin Penny.”

“She might have decided to get rough?”

“Sherry wouldn’t make a good Maryknoll.”

Clete went to Walmart that afternoon. On the way out, he ran into Swede Jensen, the Nightingale chauffeur, whom he’d helped get a job as an extra in Levon’s film adaptation. Swede was wearing white Bermuda shorts with bananas on them and a sleeveless golf shirt, his tan as dark as saddle leather, his armpit hair stiff and bleached by the sun. His concave face always reminded Clete of a hominid replica he had seen in a natural history museum.

“What’s the haps, Swede?” Clete said.

Swede looked around but kept walking.

“Wait up,” Clete said.

“Oh, hey, what say, Purcel?” Swede replied, studying his watch. “How’s it hanging?”

“I saw you on the set behind Albania Plantation. You were wearing a Confederate uniform.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.”

“They paying you okay?”

“Yeah, union scale, all that stuff.”

Clete waited for Swede to thank him. It didn’t happen. “You don’t have a conflict with your chauffeur job?”

“The Nightingales are flexible. Sorry, I got to boogie.”

“Yeah, the sky’s about to fall. Look at me.”

“Like I said—” Swede began.

“No, you didn’t say anything. Your eyes are going everywhere except my face. In the meantime, you’re blowing me off. It’s called rude.”

“Thanks for what you did. I got a ton of things to do. Nice seeing you.”

Clete stepped in his way. “Don’t talk shit to me, Swede.”

Swede looked like an animal with a limb caught in a trap.

“Did you know fear smells like soiled cat litter?” Clete said.

Swede almost ran through the door.

That weekend, Southern Louisiana was sweltering, thunder cracking as loud as cannons in the night sky; at sunrise, the storm drains clogged with dead beetles that had shells as hard as pecans. It was the kind of weather we associated with hurricanes and tidal surges and winds that ripped tin roofs off houses and bounced them across sugarcane fields like crushed beer cans; it was the kind of weather that gave the lie to the sleepy Southern culture whose normalcy we so fiercely nursed and protected from generation to generation.

I could not sleep Sunday night, and on Monday I woke with a taste like pennies in my mouth and a sense that my life was unspooling before me, that the world in which I lived was a fabrication, that the charity abiding in the human breast was a collective self-delusion, and that the bestial elements we supposedly exorcised from civilized society were not only still with us but had come to define us, although we sanitized them as drones and offshore missiles marked “occupant” and land mines that killed children decades after they were set.

These are signs of clinical depression or maybe a realistic vision of the era in which we live. During moments like these, no matter the time of day or night, I had found release only in a saloon. The long bar and brass foot rail, the wood-bladed fans, the jars of cracklings and pickled eggs and sausages, the coldness of bottled beer or ice-sheathed mugs, the wink in the barmaid’s eye and the shine on the tops of her breasts, the tumblers of whiskey that glowed with an amber radiance that seemed almost ethereal, the spectral bartender without a last name, the ringing of the pinball machine, all these things became my cathedral, a home beneath the sea, and just as deadly.

Thoughts like these are probably a form of alcoholic insanity. But on that particular Monday morning, I preferred my own madness to what I had begun to feel, as Helen and Clete did — namely, that an inchoate sickness was in our midst, and it was as palpable in the hot wetness of the dawn as the smell of lions in the street at high noon.

At 9:33 A.M., I received another call from Sherry Picard.

“I need to talk to you or Clete,” she said. “Since he’s not in his office and not answering his cell phone, I called you.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

“I was warned about you two.”

“This is a business line,” I said. “If you have a personal issue, call me at home.”

“My ass. Did you try to dime me with the FBI?”

“That’s probably one of the craziest things I’ve heard in a while.”

“Because an agent just left my office. I have the distinct feeling that I’m being looked at for the Penny homicide.”

“Talk to the U.S. Justice Department,” I said. “The feds hate Clete’s guts. I don’t have contact with them. Most of them wouldn’t take the time to spit on us.”

“Don’t give me that. They’re in contact with your boss, which means they’re in contact with you.”

“Why would either Clete or I dime you, Detective?” I said.

“Because I told him we’re not right for each other. It was fun and now we move on. It was nothing personal. I thought he was a sweet guy.”

“Rejection is not personal. That’s wonderful.”

“You’d better stay out of my life and my career,” she said.

“Be assured I will.”

“I have a second reason for calling. Levon Broussard just came into the prosecutor’s office and confessed to torturing Penny to death. What do you think of that, slick?”