The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

He stepped on the black woman’s foot, tumbled across her body with his drawstring beach bag, and smashed his head on the window. “Owie,” he said.

  “Are you hurt?” the black woman said.

  “Not much,” he said, pressing his hand against the red knot on his forehead. He gathered up his sunglasses. “I hope I didn’t hurt your foot too bad.”

  “I been reading my thought-of-the-day book. I don’t let nothing bother me.”

  “My name is Chester Wimple. What’s yours?”

  “Birdie.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Miss Birdie.” He took two unpeeled peaches from his beach bag and gave one to her and began sucking on the other, like a child finding a teat. “Sometimes people call me Smiley. I can speak Spanish.”

  She couldn’t quite put the two statements together. “Smiley is a very nice name.”

  “I have a lisp. People think it’s because I’m from New Or-yuns. It’s because I had a cleft palate that had to be operated on when I was little.”

  “Don’t let nobody be telling you your voice ain’t nice. It’s nice.”

  He flipped down the table on the back of the seat in front of him. “Do you like checkers?”

  “Our church group plays checkers and Monopoly at the old people’s home every Sunday night.”

  “I love Monopoly,” he said. He pushed back in the seat with the thrust of the plane, his face filled with delight, then felt the plane level off and catch hold of the clouds. He could see the city disappearing behind him in the twilight, the condos and palm trees and waves on Miami Beach miniaturizing, the way every stage of his life seemed to shrink and diminish into nothingness whenever he decided to move on to his next adventure. He did not understand why people had trouble with life. Every so often you got on a plane and flew away and let whatever was wrong with that place correct itself. Even the Everglades were shrinking into a tiny pattern of green islands and brown canals and bays that looked like a map rather than a watershed. Distance allowed you to sort things out. Otherwise, there was too much confusion, too many voices bouncing around in your head, too many people who needed correcting.

  He opened his folding checkerboard and set out the checkers for his new friend and himself. “You’re a lady, so you go first.”

  * * *

  SHORTLY, AS THOUGH in a dream, the sun was gone, the sky blue-black as they approached the Louis Armstrong Airport. Chester could see Lake Pontchartrain and headlights streaming across the causeway, the Mississippi winding in serpentine fashion through the wetlands, Algiers shrouded in mist across the river, the revelers dancing in the streets of the French Quarter, as though none of them had to die, the Garden District and Tulane and Loyola Universities up St. Charles Avenue, all of it streaking past him, about to become real and not as much fun as it was up here.

  He took a pad from his shirt pocket and wrote on the top page and tore it off and handed it to Birdie. “That’s my number. If you ever have any trouble, call me.” He always had difficulty with his r’s, and “trouble” came out as “twubbel.”

  Birdie looked at the blinking sign above the captain’s cabin and buckled her seat belt. “You have been very courteous to me, Smiley. I’m not fond of flying. But wit’ you, I didn’t feel no fear. Your father probably wasn’t no good. But your mama was.”

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  “Women know these things.”

  Inside the airport, he retrieved his small wheelie bag and rolled it next to Birdie out the door to the cab stand, which was located in a car tunnel under the building. Two black guys, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, locked on to Birdie and Chester as soon as they saw them, the way school yard and sidewalk bullies always recognize the weak and the vulnerable, the halt and the lame, those born ugly or fat or mentally handicapped or misshapen, those who somehow seemed deserving of torment.

  They were probably stealing luggage or shagging change or maybe shagging a country girl new to the city. They were a classic pair: sneering, loud, stupid, cruel, born of a single mother, detested in the womb, raised on welfare, smelling of funk and pomade and rut, users of their roles as victims to cause scenes when confronted with their abuse. They were both chewing gun, smacking it, their eyes bright, the unpredictable glaze you saw in the eyes of meth heads.

  “Here come Aint Jemima and the Pillsbury Doughboy,” the taller one said. He had one gold tooth and one missing tooth.

  “Shut your mouth, boy,” Birdie said.

  “Big Mama speaks,” the other guy said. His pants were so low his pubic hair was showing. “Got her jelly roll ready to rock.”

  “I’ll slap your face,” she said.

  He responded by tripping Chester. “Sorry dere, boss. He’p massah wit’ you bag?”

  Chester got up from the concrete, Birdie’s face like a hurt child’s.

  The taller guy was chewing his gum rapidly, grinning. “Go on, man. We didn’t mean nothing. Hey, you listening? Get the fuck out of here.”

  Chester opened the back door of a taxi and helped Birdie in. She looked up at him, a dignified church woman who had probably spent a large part of her life forgiving other people. “We can share the ride if you going near Gentilly.”

  He shut the door and patted the top of her hand when she placed it on the windowsill. “I got to take care of some business that came up all of a sudden.”

  “You stay out of trouble.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I love you, Miss Birdie.”

  The cab drove away. Chester stood among the crowd on the pavement, the arc lights burning overhead, his knees scraped from the fall. He watched the two black guys walk away and get into an old Honda in the parking lot. Chester grabbed the next taxi in line, one driven by an Arab who had turned his cab into a bead-strung mosque that smelled of burning incense and was filled with yowling sounds. “My name is Chester. What’s yours?”

  “Mohammed,” the driver said.

  “Do you see those two black boys?”

  “I see them, sir.”

  “They’re friends of mine. I want to go where they go.”

  The driver turned all the way around to get a full look at his passenger. He had a beard like shaggy black rope wrapped under his nose and scrolled on his cheeks. “I have seen those two men before. They are not good young men, sir.”

  “They’re bad?”

  “They are very bad.”

  “They shouldn’t be acting like that,” Chester said. “I’ll tell them.”

  The driver started the meter and drove onto I-10, not far behind the Honda.

  * * *

  THEY CROSSED THE river into Algiers and continued into a neighborhood of empty buildings, alleys oozing trash, bars on windows, rap music blaring from a club, hookers strolling under the neon. Up ahead, the Honda pulled in to the gravel drive of a darkened frame house built up from the street. There were no lights inside.

  “Let me out,” Chester said.

  “Maybe you should let me take you somewhere else, sir,” the driver said.

  “This is as far as I go. How much is the fare?”

  “Twenty-eight dollars.”

  Chester got out and paid the driver through the window. He added a five-dollar tip. “I like your music.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the driver said. “God is good.”

  Chester squinted to show that he didn’t understand.

  “Be careful, sir,” the driver said. “There are evil men in the world.”

  Chester watched the taxi drive away, then began wheeling his bag down the broken sidewalk toward the elevated house. Someone had turned on a light in back, and he saw a shadow move across the kitchen window. There were no streetlamps on the block. He pulled his bag between two cars whose engines had been stripped, and unlocked and unzipped his wheelie bag and removed a nickel-plated snub-nose .357 Magnum from the gun case inside the bag. He walked up the steps of the house, set down his beach bag, and rested his wheelie against the wall, then worked on a pair of thin cotton gloves. The screen and i
nside door were unlocked. He stepped inside and walked through the living room and into the hallway. The two black guys were eating out of cans at the kitchen table, their cigarettes burning in an ashtray, quart bottles of beer by their elbows.

  “Hi, again. My name is Chester. You hurt my knees and made fun of Miss Birdie.”

  “How the fuck—” the taller guy began.

  “A taxi. Some people call me Smiley. Know why?”

  They stared at the revolver in his hand and shook their heads. “No,” one of them said, so frightened that his mouth did not move and Chester could not tell which one had spoken.

  “I like children. They make me happy,” Chester said. “You were very bad.”

  “We didn’t mean nothing,” the shorter one said. There was dried food on his bottom lip. His fork was trembling on top of an open tuna can.

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “Sure, man,” the tall one said, as though he had been released from a bathysphere. “Sit down. You want a beer?” He raked back a chair, his face popping sweat.

  “You didn’t say it like you meant it,” Chester said.

  “We mean it, man! Come on, man, don’t point that at me. Please.”

  Just as lightning crashed into someone’s yard, Chester shot each of them, one through the throat, one through the chest. They were still alive when he stood over them and shot them again. Then he sprinkled their uneaten food in their faces and turned off the light and retrieved his beach bag and travel case and went out the back door.

  A soft rain was falling, the clouds flickering, thunder rolling dully across the wetlands. The wheels on his bag clicked monotonously down the broken sidewalks, past the abandoned buildings that were probably shooting galleries, past the club that shook with rap music. The hookers had gone inside, out of the rain. He stared through the window at the people inside and smiled at the way they danced and seemed to enjoy themselves. The neon glow of the club slid off his body like dissolving watercolor. See? he thought. Life wasn’t complicated at all. In a minute he would be gone, subsumed inside the great American night, a tiny point of light inside a galaxy that became a snowy road arching into infinity.

  He tilted back his head and let the rain fall into his mouth. He licked the drops off his lips as he would sprinkles on ice cream.

  * * *

  CLETE HAD GONE home for lunch. Homer was at private school in the little town of Cade, on the other side of Spanish Lake. Clete had begun splitting a loaf of warm French bread to make a po’boy sandwich when he looked out the window and saw the police cruiser turn in to the motor court and stop in front of his cottage; a woman was behind the wheel. The cruiser had dents and scratches on it, and one headlight hung lower than the other. It was the kind of vehicle that law enforcement agencies often issued to minority members years ago.

  A tall brunette woman in jeans and a white shirt and unshined western boots got out and knocked on the door. Clete looked around the room. Homer’s baseball bat and glove were on a chair. He threw his raincoat over them and opened the door.

  “Detective Sherry Picard,” she said. “I need a few minutes of your time.”

  “I’m about to eat.”

  “Put it on hold.” She stepped inside.

  “Why don’t you just come in?” he said, shutting the door after her.

  “Go ahead with what you were doing.” She sat down at a table by the window and took a pad and ballpoint from her shirt pocket. “You have a nice view.”

  “Look, Miss Sherry—”

  “Detective.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I got to get back to—”

  “I’m here for two reasons, Mr. Purcel. We’re looking for a missing kid named Homer Penny. Not ‘missing’ in the real sense but missing from the system, if you get my meaning. Someone went into the crime scene where his father was tortured to death and took his clothes from a dresser. Know who might have done that?”

  “Someone who knew the kid needed his clothes. Someone who knew the kid would be better off on the moon than in the hands of the people who returned him to his father.”

  Her eyes went to the chair where Clete had thrown the raincoat. One flap hung over the tip of the baseball bat.

  “The second reason I’m here is about Kevin Penny. We found a gold cigarette lighter in the trailer. It belongs to Detective Labiche. But he’s got an explanation. He was sent there by Sheriff Soileau to interview Penny.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t go there for other reasons.”

  “You’re not a fan?”

  “Labiche is a dirty cop.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can smell one. He also has a hard-on for Dave Robicheaux.”

  “Thanks for telling me that. Who’s Labiche on a pad for?”

  “Tony Nine Ball. Maybe some meth guys in East Texas. Maybe some greaseballs in Tampa or Miami. Take your choice. We’re everybody’s punch.”

  “You know who Maximo Soza and JuJu Ladrine are?”

  “One’s a psychopath, the other has a triple-A battery for a brain. They both work for Tony.”

  “You think they’re capable of crucifying a man and drilling his elbows and knees?”

  “Maximo would do it in a blink. It’s not like JuJu.”

  “What would be the motivation?”

  “What motivates these guys to do anything? Half the things they believe don’t exist. They’re the dumbest shits on earth. That’s why they’re criminals.”

  “How about this? Kevin Penny was a federal informant. Maybe Soza and Ladrine were sent to find out if Penny dimed them or Tony Nemo.”

  “Too extreme, in my opinion.”

  “So where does that leave us?” she said, looking straight at him as though she knew the answer to her question.

  “You got me. I run down bail skips and do other kinds of scut work for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”

  “How about the fact that they were following you around? They even parked their vehicle by the house of your lady friend while you were doing a sleepover.”

  “How about leaving third parties out of this?” he said.

  “Then you had a confrontation with them in downtown Jennings. Then your lady friend got beaten to a pulp. The word is you have some bad markers out. You also gave Kevin Penny a bad time about his kid. Maybe you figured all three of them for the beating of the Ardoin woman, and you started with Penny.”

  Clete halved the loaf of French bread into two long buns and began layering them with lettuce and sliced tomatoes and chopped onions and deep-fried crawfish and oysters he had taken from the icebox. “Short answer, Detective: I never put a hand on Penny.”

  “We lifted a lot of prints from the trailer. Most of them were in the computer at the NCIC. Some were not. That bothers me.”

  “Because people like Penny don’t have normal friends?”

  “But yours were all over the place. I’ve seen your sheet. I’ve known recidivists who would be in awe of your record.”

  He released the handle of the knife and stared straight ahead. “I’ll try again. I was in the Crotch. I did two tours in Vietnam. I saw guys who were skinned alive and hung in trees. I don’t torture people.” He picked up a small clean brush and began painting mayonnaise and shrimp dip on his sandwich.

  “My husband was killed in Iraq,” she said.

  He turned around. Her face was calm, her eyes clear. She seemed to be looking at a thought or memory inside her head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You have to get on the square about the missing boy, Mr. Purcel.”

  “I am on the square. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to that little boy again.”

  “You committed a felony by deliberately violating a crime scene and taking items from it. You know that, don’t you?”

  He put the sandwich together and cut it in half. “I’ll split this with you.”

  She got up and walked to the chair where the raincoat was. She tugged it slightly so it covered the b
ottom of the bat. “No, thanks.”

  He wiped his hands on a dish towel and watched her. She wore her gun and badge and cuffs on her belt, perhaps as a statement of her own identity and in defiance of male authority. She wasn’t aggressive, but she wasn’t passive, either. She seemed to live inside a place beyond the fray. She straightened her shoulders and looked out the window at the live oaks arching over the driveway. She turned around, as though asking him Why the silence?

  “There’s a snitch in Lafayette named Pookie Domingue,” Clete said. “Sometimes people call him Pookie the Possum. He says the word is out you’d better get your head on straight.”

  “Or?”

  “There’re eight dead women who want justice. Somebody out there doesn’t want that to happen, Miss Sherry.”

  “Detective Picard,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Forget I said anything. I think I really screwed up in a previous incarnation.”

  Clete sat down at the table and bit into his sandwich.

  Then she was standing behind him. “I’m going to cover your ass as best I can. Take care of Homer and Ms. Ardoin. If you shot me a line on any of this, I’ll be back.”

  She dragged a fingernail across the back of his neck as she went out the door. He set down his food and went out on the stoop. He was going to tell her something. He was sure of that. He just didn’t know what it was.

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON HELEN and I met with the prosecutor, Lala Segretti. He was tall and in his mid-fifties and had freckles and thinning light red hair and wore suspenders and always looked wired. When he was a long-distance runner at LSU and a pretty girl would walk by he would say “Ooh-la-la” to hide that he was afraid of girls because he’d grown up in a fundamentalist church Ayatollah Khomeini could have invented. He was a family man and a straight shooter, but he obsessed over things of no consequence and sometimes translated the Old Testament into a political mind-set that precluded compassion, particularly when it came to capital punishment.

  We were in the conference room at a long oak table with him at the head of it, pages from my report spaced out in front of him. He was blinking, his jaw tight. He was obviously agitated, but I didn’t know about what. He was one of those men who could eat any kind of food without gaining weight, as though a flame in his stomach burned off the intake the second it came down the pipe.