Robicheaux

Chapter 39

Clete left the concourse and worked his way to the other side of the Dome, hoping to come up on the backside of the stage. If he could make it that far, he was going to walk onto the stage. It was undignified, self-abasing, and maybe the act of a public fool. What did it matter? He thought of the graves he had dug with an e-tool, the bodies hung in trees after the VC got finished with them, the people who had sat on scalding rooftops in the Lower Ninth Ward, waiting for the helicopters. This was the kind of world Clete believed Jimmy Nightingale would preside over. The man used people as he would a suppository. Clete wanted to print him on a wall.

But this was a fantasy, and he knew it. As a boy, Clete had never been a bully, although older and bigger boys had bullied him. He even forgave the kid from the Iberville Project who bashed him with the pipe that left the scar through his eyebrow. The kid had grown up no differently than Clete and later died at Khe Sanh. For Clete, the myth of Wyatt Earp was not a myth. You smoked them when they dealt the play but not before, even if you had to eat a bullet. And for that reason alone, Clete would always be at a disadvantage in dealing with a cunning man like Nightingale, who, minutes earlier, had incorporated the racism of Bobby Earl into his campaign while acting as the bestower of forgiveness.

Clete passed a restroom and a locked office, then found a door that opened onto a storage area under the stands. He opened a second door onto an entryway from which he could see the backside of Nightingale as he introduced a famous country singer wearing a thick-felt tall-crowned white cowboy hat and a pale blue western-cut suit stitched with flowers.

Clete also saw a beer vendor whose pants and shirt looked dipped in starch, the trousers stuffed inside rubber boots, a Nightingale baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He was a short, pudgy man with lips like red licorice.

Clete stared at the vendor but didn’t move. What was he waiting for? He started again toward the aisle, his gaze riveted on the vendor’s neck. Let it play out, a voice said.

His stomach was churning. Maybe he’s just an ordinary guy, he thought. What if you start something and security gets the wrong idea and the guy gets hurt just so Nightingale is safe?

But he knew the real reason for his unwillingness to act. The weight on his heart was the size of an anvil.

“What are you doing here, asshole?” a voice said.

Clete turned around. Once again he was looking into the face that was one of many he could never rid himself of. The faces were out of a subculture that fed on need and dysfunction and systemic cruelty, in this case the face of an old-time gunbull whose measure of self-worth was the degree to which he could inspire terror in others. He wore tight gray slacks with high pockets and a shirt the color of tin and a bolo tie and a salt-and-pepper mustache as stiff as wire and a belt equipped with Mace, handcuffs, a slapjack, and a blue-black semi-auto with checkered grips.

“Birl Wooster is the full name, isn’t it?” Clete said.

“When I woke up, it was. Answer my question.”

“I just saw a beer vendor who might be the guy called Smiley.”

“You’re talking about this guy out of Florida?”

“He’s down there.”

“Where?”

Clete turned around and looked down the aisle. “I don’t see him now.”

“Because he was never there.”

“A guy who fits his description was there.”

“And you’re a goddamn liar.”

Clete’s eyes searched the crowd again. “I think we blew an opportunity. But maybe not.”

“You know why I don’t like you, Purcel? One guy like you taints a whole department. It’s like trying to launder the stink out of shit.”

“You screwed the pooch, dickhead. By the way, that black kid you killed on the levee? He was nineteen.”

“Until he stopped being nineteen,” Wooster said. “I lost a lot of sleep over that.”

“How’s it feel?” Clete said.

“How’s what feel?”

Clete shook his head. “Don’t pay attention to me.”

Wooster removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it into his mouth. “I’m going to dial you up one of these days, Purcel.”

The crowd began to drain from the Dome.

“I hear there’s a reception at the casino,” Clete said.

“Not for you, there isn’t.”

“See you around, Wooster. Don’t beat up on any handicapped people.”

Wooster elevated the toothpick with his teeth, his eyes veiled.

I found Sherry Picard in the concourse and called Clete again. This time he answered.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Behind the stage,” he said. “I just got braced by an ex-gunbull from Angola. He blew away a black inmate for sassing him and put a shank on his body. A guy named Wooster.”

“Who?”

“He does security for Nightingale.”

“What does Wooster have to do with anything?” I said.

“Nothing. I think I saw Smiley. He’s posing as a beer vendor. I was maybe forty feet from him when Wooster came down on me.”

“You let a hump for Nightingale stop you from taking down Smiley?”

“Not exactly.”

I couldn’t put together what he was saying. Then it hit me. “You were going to let Smiley get to Nightingale?”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“I’m with Sherry Picard. Wait for us.”

“You brought her here?”

“No, she came on her own.”

“Butt out on this, Dave. I got a handle on it.”

“The way you handled Smiley?”

“You want the truth?” he said. “I was going to make sure both of them went off the board. Wooster screwed things up.”

“Stay where you are.”

“I’m going to the casino. My car is parked six blocks away. It’ll take me a while to get there.”

“What’s at the casino?”

“A reception for Nightingale.”

“I’ll drop the dime on you, Cletus.”

“No, you won’t. Keep Sherry out of it. I’m copacetic and very cool and collected and totally in control of the situation. You’re the best, big mon.”

Clete had to walk to the other side of LaSalle to retrieve his Caddy. The sky was still dark, the rain blowing off the roofs of the few lighted buildings along the street. He cut through an alley lined with banana plants and garbage cans that had been knocked over by the wind. Twice he thought he heard footsteps behind him, but when he turned around, no one was there. The second time, he stepped between two buildings and waited. An elderly black man on a bicycle pedaled down the sidewalk at the end of the alley. Clete continued on.

He walked past a collapsed garage to the back of a deserted brick house where he had parked his vehicle. A tall man in a slicker and a wilted rain hat was standing by the driver’s door. His face was dark with shadow. His shoulders were rectangular, his coat open, his hands invisible. “Beat you to it.”

“You’d make a good bird dog,” Clete said.

“Nice wheels,” the tall man said.

“Am I going to have trouble with you?” Clete said.

“You hold grudges, Purcel. That nigger I popped had a shiv on him.”

“After you planted it.”

“You killed a federal witness.”

“It was an accident.”

“That’s why you hid out in El Salvador. A lot of people go down there when they do something by accident.”

Clete looked at his watch. “What’s your problem, Wooster?”

“I don’t have one. You do. The federal witness you killed was a friend of mine. You got your drop with you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Maybe I can make use of it.”

“I’m not carrying.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re in the shitter.” Wooster parted his coat and lifted a semi-auto into the light. He grinned. “We can do it standing up. Or you can kneel down.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t like you. I put down seven people nobody knows about. What do you say to that?”

“Give your bullshit to somebody else.”

“Look into the barrel and tell me it’s bullshit.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“Kicks.”

“A guy like you does nothing for kicks. Except maybe standing in line to fuck your mother.”

“Later tonight, after you’re dead, I’m going to get laid. Think about that.”

“Since I’m about to go out, tell me something. Who put the drill to Kevin Penny?”

“Maybe you’re looking at him. Who cares? Bye-bye, asshole.”

So this is how it comes, Clete thought. Not the Jolly Green caving in half when an RPG came through the bay, the frag he took in the carotid, the two rounds in the back while carrying his best friend down a fire escape, the burning roof that crashed on him when he ran through the flames with a little girl wrapped in a blanket.

“Fuck you, Wooster,” he said.

Then he saw a flash at the entrance to the alley across the street, like a downed power line that had dropped onto a car roof, and heard a sound like phifth or someone spitting. Wooster heard and saw it also. He widened his eyes and stared into the darkness, his gun still pointed at Clete’s chest. His jaw was hooked, his profile like a barracuda’s.

Clete heard the sound twice again. The first round punched through Wooster’s throat. Still holding the gun, he clenched one hand over the wound, blood congealing immediately between his fingers. He made a choking sound, as if he’d swallowed a fish bone. The second round made a hole less than the diameter of a pencil above his eyebrow, as though a bug had settled on it, and exited the back of his head cleanly and knocked out a window in a garage. He fell into a greasy pool of water, curled in an embryonic position, the rain falling in his eyes.

A cat meowed by a garbage can. The wind gusted, and a strip of tin on the roof of the deserted house swung on a nail. Clete slid behind the wheel of the Caddy and drove around the body into the street, hitting his brights, lighting up the alleyway where the shots had come from. His wipers were beating wildly, the windshield fogging. At the end of the alley, he saw a man in rubber boots running, a rifle cupped in his right hand, his skin as white as a slug’s.

Clete picked up his cell phone from the seat and dialed a number with his thumb.

Sherry Picard and I were inside the casino when I got his call. The casino was packed, the roar of noise deafening. “I can’t hear you, Clete. You’re not making sense.”

“I went to get my car,” he said. “Wooster, the gunbull, was waiting for me. He was going to kill me. He almost did.”

“How would he know where your car was?”

“He was walking behind me, then got ahead of me and saw the Caddy,” he replied. “I asked him if he did Kevin Penny. He said maybe. Then Smiley put two bullets in him.”

“You’re talking about the security guy?”

“Who do you think?”

“He killed Penny?”

“Maybe he was working my crank.”

I worked my way into a corner, far from the drink and food tables where most of the crowd was concentrating. “Why would Smiley drop one of Nightingale’s security people?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t an accident. The guy is too good a shot.”

“Smiley owes you?”

“Most of his victims were abused women or children or connected with people who abused women or children. Smiley tried to put a bomb in my car. He might have killed Homer. So maybe Smiley found out he got set up to kill a child and started cleaning the slate. Where’s Nightingale?”

“Forget about Nightingale,” I said.

“Like I can.”

“Did you call 911 on the shooting?”

“In New Orleans? NOPD would have me on the injection table.”

“Where are you now?”

“In a filling-station restroom, washing the splatter off me. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Drop it, Clete. Let’s go back to New Iberia.”

“That’s what you’re always trying to do, Dave. You don’t get it.”

“Pardon?”

“The place you remember isn’t there,” he said. “There’re no safe places anymore. Everyone knows that except you.”

No, “everyone” did not. I had at least one partner in my grand illusion about the relativity of time and the melding together of the past and present and future and the possibility that the dead are still with us, like the boys in butternut marching through the flooded cypress at Spanish Lake, and the slaves who beckon us to remove the chains that bind them to the auction block, and all the wandering souls who want to scratch their names on a plaster wall so someone will remember their sacrifice, the struggle that began with the midwife’s slap of life and their long day’s journey into the grave.

I think madness is a matter of definition. But if you are afflicted by it, you thank God for those who share it with you. And that was why I was always drawn to Levon Broussard and, paradoxically, to Jimmy Nightingale. Neither accepted the world as it is, and neither was entirely rational. However, their difference lay elsewhere, and in this case the difference was critical not only to them but to us. Jimmy was a brilliant man who, of his own volition, chose to model himself on his benighted antecedents, demagogues who need no more mention. Conversely, Levon was the artist who enlisted in lost causes, flagellating himself because he could not change the nature of mankind.

After I finished talking to Clete, my cell phone throbbed again. It was Alafair.

“Rowena and Levon Broussard just left our house,” she said. “You won’t believe this.”

“I probably will,” I replied.

“Rowena says she tortured and killed Kevin Penny.”

“Yep.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“What do they plan to do now?”

“They didn’t say. Rowena wanted to get it off her conscience. After Penny raped her, she thought he might be involved with the murder of the girls in Jeff Davis Parish. She thought she was going to get justice for them. And for herself.”

“What did she find out from Penny?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m not sure I believe her story. Maybe she’s muddying the water so Levon can skate. Maybe neither of them is involved.”

“Are you serious?” she said.

“A former hack at Angola named Wooster told Clete he did it.”

“Told him when?”

“Tonight, just before Smiley killed him.”

“Smiley just killed someone else? In New Orleans?”

“He gets around. Call Rowena and Levon and tell them what I said.”

“You’re trying to queer the DA’s case, aren’t you.”

“All this would come up in discovery anyway. The former gunbull was going to kill Clete. Smiley saved his life.”

“I bet he loves his mother, too,” she said.

“I doubt it. Talk to you later, Alf.”

I closed the cell phone.