The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “You tell your father what I said.”

  Alafair’s ears were still ringing when she got home.

  THAT EVENING ALAFAIR told me of her conversation with Emmeline Nightingale. “What’s she after?” she asked.

  “Money or power or both. Maybe sex is involved,” I said. “But that comes automatically with the other two.”

  “She and her cousin are rich and powerful already.”

  “They may be brother and sister.”

  “Then why don’t they tell people that?”

  “Kevin Penny says they’re very close.” I let it sink in.

  “They’re getting it on?”

  “The royalty are insular in St. Mary Parish.”

  “Yuck,” she said.

  “Tony Nemo wants to produce Levon’s book. Jimmy Nightingale not only wants to adapt it but is envious of Levon. If I were a prosecutor, I’d use that as motivation for the rape. He couldn’t be Levon, so he’d take second best.”

  “That’s really crude.”

  “So is rape.”

  Alafair walked to the kitchen window and bit a fingernail. A tugboat was headed up the bayou, its gunwales hung with tires, the wake sliding into the cypress trees.

  “Dave, I know how to make this script work. It could be a great film. The story of the drummer boy at Shiloh could be a film in itself.”

  “Tell all this to Levon.”

  “He’s an angry man.”

  “About his wife?”

  “I don’t think he believes his portrayal of his ancestors is honest.”

  “In his novels?”

  “In everything.”

  “That could be a problem,” I said.

  * * *

  I DROVE UP loreauville Road to the Broussard home and rang the door chimes. Tiny black strings of ash were floating down on the lawn and driveway and the steps and camellia bushes. I thought they were from the sugar mill.

  Levon came around the side of the house, a leaf rake in his hand. “Back here.”

  I followed him into the backyard, where he was burning huge piles of blackened leaves in three perforated oil drums. The curds of smoke were drifting into his neighbor’s windows and hanging like dirty cotton on the bayou.

  “When’s the last time you burned your leaves?” I said.

  “A couple of years ago. Why?”

  “No reason. Emmeline Nightingale has been bugging Alafair.”

  He hefted a giant sheaf of compressed leaves and dropped them into the flames, his face swelling in the heat. “What does that have to do with us?”

  “Maybe nothing. Except Tony Nemo is on Clete Purcel’s back and also in my face, directly or indirectly because of a sword your great-grandfather carried. At least that’s where all this started.”

  “So you’ve come out here to tell me my great-grandfather’s sword is the origin of your problems?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then why are you upset?” he asked.

  “I’m not upset.”

  “You could fool me,” he said.

  “Have you ever been knocked down in your own backyard?”

  He began packing more leaves in the barrels, his armpits looped with sweat, ash raining down on his head and bare forearms.

  “Levon?”

  “Go home.”

  “I’m an officer of the law. This isn’t a courtesy call.”

  I waited for him to respond. He jabbed the leaves into the flames with the butt of the rake.

  “Sir, don’t you turn your back to me,” I said.

  “I’ll do what I damn please.”

  “No, you will not.” I put my hand on his arm and turned him around. “This case isn’t about just you and your wife. It concerns Tony Nine Ball, and something Jimmy Nightingale did in South America, and a lowlife named Kevin Penny, and something you’re not telling me about your wife.”

  “That’s a goddamn lie.”

  “What is?”

  “All your bullshit, Dave. I don’t have anything to do with gangsters or lowlifes or friends of yours. Rowena was raped. End of fucking story.”

  “It’s just the beginning.”

  “If it wasn’t for your age, I’d pop you one.”

  “Really? Then you have my dispensation. Forget I’m a cop, too.”

  He looked away, his hands balling. “Come inside.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade in my office. Keep it quiet, though. Rowena is asleep.”

  He unlocked the French doors on the patio and waited for me to walk ahead of him. A pitcher and a glass sat on a folding table by his desk. He filled the glass and wrapped it with a paper napkin and handed it to me, then went to the kitchen and got a glass for himself. For the first time, behind the door, I saw a sun-faded Confederate battle flag mounted on the wall in a glass case. He came back into the room.

  “A fourteen-year-old boy carried that up the slope on Beauregard’s left flank at Shiloh,” Levon said. “They were supposed to be supported by the founder of Angola Penitentiary, but he didn’t show up. Forty percent were casualties in fifteen minutes.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to say. I disliked people who thought war was a glorious endeavor, and I disliked those who enjoyed talking about it. I despised those who had not seen war yet espoused it and lived vicariously through the suffering of others and never gave a thought to the civilians and children who died in burn wards or were buried under collapsed buildings.

  Levon was not one of these. He had gone unarmed and with a leftist reputation into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua when bodies were dumped off trucks with the morning garbage. Yet here we stood in reverence before an iconic flag that retained the pink stain of a farm boy’s blood, and whether anybody would admit it or not, the cause it represented was the protection and furtherance of human bondage.

  “You have nothing to say about it?” he asked.

  “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. The statement doesn’t make the poor man any less honorable or brave.”

  “You don’t give an inch, do you.”

  “No.”

  “That’s not a compliment,” he said.

  “I didn’t think it was. How’s your wife?”

  “On painkillers.”

  He sat down in a swivel chair behind his desk and opened a bottom drawer and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and let it drop on top of the desk. “You on or off the grog?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He poured three inches into his glass. I watched the lemonade change color, the ice rise frosty and thick. He took a long pull, watching me, then wiped his mouth. “Nightingale and his sister or whatever she is have one agenda. They want to kill the rape story in the bud. They’re using you to do it.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Nightingale is a master manipulator, Dave. He fleeces uneducated and compulsive people in his casinos, pretending to be their friend, when in reality he wouldn’t take time to piss in their mouths if they were dying of thirst. This guy might be our next United States senator. He might even end up in the White House. Think about that for a minute.”

  “What is it you’re not telling me about your wife?”

  “What makes you think I’m hiding something?”

  “Because you’re a smart man who allowed his wife to destroy the forensic evidence that would have made the case against Nightingale.”

  His eyes went away from me. “My wife is bipolar. She’s also barren. Occasionally, she does things that are irrational. But none of that alters the fact that she was assaulted by that son of a bitch over in St. Mary Parish.”

  I was sitting on the couch a few feet from him. “I might be indicted in the death of the man who killed my wife.”

  “Why are you telling me that now?”

  “I know what it feels like to be disbelieved.”

  “You didn’t do it?”

  “That’s the i
rony. I don’t know. The last person I can trust or believe is me.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “You should have told me.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes I feel like a fraud. That’s something no one can ever accuse you of.” He drank his glass to the bottom and looked out the window at the three live oaks he had named for Confederate officers. “What a pile of shit.”

  Then, without saying another word, he left me in his office and went outside and resumed stuffing mounds of leaves in the waste barrels, throwing a jelly glass full of gasoline onto the fire, indifferent to the whoosh of heat that must have singed his eyebrows.

  * * *

  ALMOST TWO WEEKS went by without any change in the status of the Dartez homicide or the sexual assault charges filed by Rowena Broussard. Clete Purcel took Carolyn Ardoin to dinner and a movie in Lafayette. Then the next night to a movie in Lake Charles. Then three days later to a street dance and crawfish boil in Abbeville.

  “You’re going to wear me out,” she said on their way back to Jennings.

  “I’ve been keeping you up too late?”

  “It’s grand being out with you, Clete.”

  The top of his Caddy was up, and her skin looked warm and rosy in the glow of the dash lights. He liked everything about her. The way she shook all over when she laughed, the happy shine in her eyes, her manners and all the books she had read. He turned in to her neighborhood, not wanting the night to end.

  The houses were small and clapboard with tin roofs, the yards neat and without fences, the driveways nothing more than gravel tracks. If the contemporary automobiles were taken away, the year could have been 1935. He pulled up to the curb. She had not left her porch light on.

  He went around to the passenger side and opened the door. When she got out, she looked him directly in the face and smiled. He could smell the gardenias and the two magnolia trees in her yard. She touched his arm when she stood up from the leather seat.

  “I’ll walk you up to the steps,” he said. “I’ve sure enjoyed the evening.”

  “As I, Clete.” She looked at the sky. There was a rain ring around the moon. “Tomorrow is Saturday.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “With no work obligations.”

  “Probably a rainy morning, too,” he said. “It’s a fine time of year.”

  In the darkness of the gallery, she took her key from her purse. She looked up into his face. “You’re a gentleman. You’re kind and strong, and you respect women. Those things are not lost on a woman.”

  “I didn’t quite get that.”

  “If you need to go, I understand. I just want you to know you’re always welcome here and that I appreciate your gentlemanly ways.”

  When he spoke, he felt as though he had swallowed a pebble. “I’d love to come in.”

  Inside, she closed the blinds and turned on a light in a back hallway. “This way.”

  In the bedroom, the wood floor creaked under his weight as he approached her. She turned on a lamp. The wallpaper was covered with roses. The quilt on the bed was lavender, the pillows pink. He felt as though he were inside a dollhouse, but in a good way. “Miss Carolyn, I’ve led a checkered life.”

  “Who hasn’t?” she replied.

  * * *

  HE LEFT HER house early in the morning, before the neighbors were up, to avoid making Carolyn a subject of gossip. There was not a person on the street. The morning paper lay on people’s galleries or walkways. The trees ticked with moisture. At the end of the block, he looked in the outside mirror and saw an SUV swing out of an alley and follow him.

  He coasted to the curb, cut the engine, and pretended to look for something in the glove box. The SUV passed him. The windows were charcoaled and rolled up except for a crack at the top, probably for a smoker. Clete wrote down the tag number on a small white pad he kept in the well of the console. At the next intersection, the SUV turned and disappeared down a side street.

  Clete drove downtown and ate in a café, stationing himself at a table with a view of the street. Before his food arrived, he saw the SUV park at an angle in front of a hardware store that had gone out of business. After a few minutes, the driver opened the door far enough to drop a cigarette on the asphalt. The driver was wearing a checked sport coat and a gray knit cap with a bill.

  Clete ate his breakfast, paid the check, and went outside, his gaze fixed on a black kid skateboarding down the sidewalk. Then he crossed the street and tapped on the window of the SUV.

  Maximo Soza lowered the window. JuJu Ladrine was in the passenger seat, his face stretched with tension. Maximo scratched a spot under his eye. “I don’t see no envelope.”

  “Envelope?” Clete said.

  “It’s Saturday. You got to pay the vig,” Maximo said.

  “I think I hit you too hard in the head with the rubber machine.”

  “The vig is the vig, man. It’s due on Saturday. If you got to sell your body parts online, you pay the vig.”

  “You put a Taser on me, Max. But I’m letting that slide. You got to do the same. That means you and JuJu pack up your shit and go back to New Orleans.”

  Maximo turned his head with the stiffness of a ventriloquist’s dummy and let his eyes settle on Clete’s. “Tony will hang you on a hook by your asshole. Or maybe somebody else will have to pay the price for what you ain’t taken care of.”

  “You want to clarify that?”

  “Nobody can be all places at once,” Maximo said. He started the engine. “Step back. I don’t want to run over your foot.”

  Clete felt a sensation like stitches popping loose inside his head. He opened the driver’s door and tore Maximo out of the seat, lifting him high in the air, then crashing him on the hood. Maximo rolled off on the asphalt. “Son of a beech, what the fuck, man?”

  Clete threw him against the fender and told him to take the position. When Maximo tried to turn around, Clete kicked the man’s feet apart and drove his face against the hood, then smashed it down a second time for good measure.

  “I ain’t carrying, man!” Maximo said.

  “What do you call this?” Clete said, holding up a switchblade knife.

  “See what I use it for later. I’ll be back, man.”

  Clete turned him upside down and shook him like a rag doll, spilling coins, keys, a rabbit’s foot, a pair of dice, a box of condoms, a cell phone, credit cards, and a wallet in the gutter.

  “You leave that man alone!” someone called from across the street.

  Clete dropped Maximo on the asphalt, then picked him up and threw him back into the driver’s seat. He looked up and down the street. No cops yet. He put Maximo’s belongings into his cap and tossed it to JuJu. Maximo’s eyes were crossed, blood running in two scarlet strings from his nostrils. He was trying to speak. Clete smashed his face into the horn button.

  “You got a brain, JuJu,” he said. “Tell Tony what happened. Also tell him if he sends you guys after me again, he’s going off the board, oxygen bottle and colostomy bag included. That goes for you, too, JuJu.”

  “It don’t work that way, Clete,” JuJu said. “Why you making it hard on everybody?”

  “Me?”

  “It’s you went to the shylocks. Not us.”

  “Get out of here,” Clete said.

  He slammed the driver’s door and walked to the Caddy, burning with shame, eyes straight ahead, trying to ignore the stares of people around him and the knowledge that he had involved a gentle lady in a world she could not have imagined in her worst nightmares.

  * * *

  CLETE CAME BY my house that night. It was raining hard, and he ran from the Caddy through the puddles in the yard to the gallery. I could smell weed on him through the screen. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Who said anything happened?” he replied, brushing past me into the living room, his face oily and dilated. He blew his nose into a handkerchief.

  “You just get in from Juárez?” I said.

  “Cut it out, Dav
e. I feel bad enough.” He told me about Maximo and JuJu.

  “Maximo was threatening Miss Carolyn?” I said.

  “That’s the gist.”

  “Does she know?”

  “She was going to visit her mother in Lake Charles today. I left a couple of messages. What am I going to do? I feel awful.”

  “Jennings PD might throw a scare into them.”

  “The same guys who couldn’t come up with one suspect in eight homicides?”

  “Weed and booze aren’t going to help.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  “Don’t use that language in my house, Cletus.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I went into the kitchen and came back with a pair of Dr Peppers. “I think Tony wants to make movies. I think that’s what started all this.”

  “So what?”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “You’re going to talk reason to that pile of whale shit?”

  “He bought a sword that he thought would get him in the good graces of Levon Broussard, and instead he lost the sword and had the door slammed in his face. So being the infantile narcissist he is, he’s throwing his scat all over the room.”

  Clete stared at me. “You think it’s that simple?”

  “How much time does he have left? Have you been in a closed room with him? He’s got the smell of death on him, and he knows it. It’s like wallpaper and dead flowers. He wants to see his name in lights before he goes out.”

  “A guy like that doesn’t have a soul.”

  “That’s why he wants his name in lights.”

  He studied my face. “Where’s Alafair?”

  “At the grocery.”

  “She’s doing okay? Every time I look at her, I see her as a little girl. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “What if I treat y’all to dinner at Café Des Amis tonight?” he said.

  “I was just about to suggest that.”

  He grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  SUNDAY MORNING, I asked Alafair for the names of the ten worst, most mean-spirited, corrupt movie producers or directors in the industry.

  “What are you doing, Dave?”

  “Stirring up things. Know a few guys out there who are off the wall?”

  “Enough to fill the Hollywood Bowl.”