The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  “What stuff?”

  “Those cameras I mentioned in the hotels? There was this one working girl I thought was on the square. They got me good on the video. I was married.”

  “Why is it I feel like you’re telling half of something?”

  “I want to be a good cop. I’m seeing this Cajun girl, Babette. You know her. At the bar-and-grill. She’s a nice girl.”

  “You’d better treat her as one.”

  “Lay off it. I’m hurting enough. I’ve been hitting the sauce a little too hard. I know you’re A.A. I thought I could go to a meeting with you.”

  I brushed at my nose. “You don’t need me to do that.”

  “Like get lost?”

  “The hotline is in the phone book. Dial them up.”

  “Forget I came in here. That guy out there. I got a funny feeling about why he’s here. I mean the real issue.”

  I leaned back in my chair and spun my ballpoint on the ink blotter. “What feeling is that?”

  He squeezed his temples, his eyes crossing. “He’s got a list of people to pop. Jimmy Nightingale is one of them.”

  “What do you base that on?”

  “Nightingale is too smart, and he knows too much. He’s also got a reputation for shitcanning his friends after he gets what he wants. Don’t you get it? These people are like a bunch of scorpions in a matchbox. They kill each other all the time. Why should they care about us? They use us and throw us away.”

  I had never seen a man more tortured by his own thoughts.

  “You’re just going to stare at me and not say anything?” he asked.

  “I think you need to talk to a minister or a psychiatrist, Spade.”

  “I could have been your friend. Except you don’t want friends. You’re a hardnose. You think everybody has to cut it on their own.”

  “Take it somewhere else, partner.”

  He stood up. His skin was gray, the way people’s faces look when they see the grave. “I need help.”

  I hated what I had to do. I wrote my cell phone number on a memo slip and handed it to him. “There’s a meeting at seven o’clock. I can pick you up.”

  He crunched the memo slip and bounced it on my desk. “I’ll stick with drinking. I may get popped, but I’m not going to crawl. I’ll still be me, for good or bad. What will you be? A big fish in a dirty pond.”

  “You said Jimmy Nightingale knows too much. Too much about what?”

  “How Frankenstein works,” he replied. “What’d you think?”

  * * *

  I THOUGHT THAT, one way or another, my life was moving away from the night T. J. Dartez died. I was wrong. Sleep is a mercurial mistress. She caresses and absolves and gives light and rest to the soul in our darkest hours. Or she fills us with fear and doubt and disjointed images that seem dredged out of the Abyss. If you’re a drunk, she can instill memories in you that may be manufactured. Or not. And clicking on a bedside lamp will not rid you of them; nor will the coming of the dawn. They take on their own existence and feed at the heart the way a succubus would.

  In the dream, I saw the face of Dartez behind the window of his truck, illuminated by the passing headlights of a vehicle on the two-lane. His mouth was red and twisted out of shape, a rubbery hole trying to make sound. His forehead struck the glass. Then I was grabbing him and pulling him through the window, his body thrashing. I came down on him with all my weight, reaching with my fingers for his face. Was I trying to gouge his eyes, to drive a thumb deep into a socket, to break his windpipe?

  I woke shaking and sat on the side of the bed in the moonlight. I had never had such a bad dream except for the ones I’d brought back from overseas. Alafair stood in the doorway, backlit by a red light on a clock flashing in the hallway.

  “I heard you talking,” she said.

  “What was I saying?”

  “ ‘Don’t fight.’ Then you said something in French. Maybe ‘Que t’a pre faire? Arrêt!’”

  “ ‘What are you doing? Quit!’ ”

  “I can’t be sure.” Her eyes were full of sorrow. “It’s almost dawn. You want me to fix you something to eat?”

  “I think I’ll go back to sleep. It was just a dream.”

  “About the war?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t lie to the only people you can count on.”

  “Okay, Alf.”

  “I’m going to get back on my manuscript. Try to sleep.”

  “Don’t get close to Tony Nemo.”

  “He comes around the set. Nobody pays attention to him.”

  I lay back down on the pillow. “See you later, Alfenheimer.”

  She closed the door. I stared at the ceiling, afraid to sleep again.

  * * *

  I KNEW IT would happen. Sunday morning, I saw Babette Latiolais outside the church I attended. The church was located in a mixed-race neighborhood, one of windmill palms and small frame houses with tin roofs and yards that had no fences. She was wearing a pillbox hat that looked dug out of an attic, and a pink suit that probably came from a secondhand store. She saw me out of the corner of her eye and quickened her step in the opposite direction.

  I caught up with her. “You’re not going to say hello, Miss Babette?”

  “Hi,” she said, not slowing.

  “You in a hurry?”

  “My li’l girl is by herself. I got to get some cereal, then we going to church.”

  “You belong to St. Edward’s?”

  “I go to Assembly of God. Why you axing me this?” She kept her face at an angle so that one side was covered with shadow.

  “Can you look at me, Miss Babette?”

  “What you t’ink I’m doing?”

  “Look at me.”

  “I got to go, Mr. Dave.”

  “Who hit you?”

  “Suh, please don’t be doing this. It was an accident.”

  “Spade did this?”

  “He was drunk. I fussed at him.”

  “A man who strikes a woman is a moral and physical coward. A cop who hits a woman is the bottom of the barrel. Is Labiche at your house?”

  “I don’t know where he’s at.”

  “You need to file charges. We don’t want a man like this representing the sheriff’s department.”

  “I ain’t going near that building. Ain’t nobody there gonna he’p me. I already taken care of it.”

  “How?”

  “My cousin used to be a landscaper for Jimmy Nightingale. He called Mr. Jimmy and tole him what happened. Mr. Jimmy sent a lawyer and a doctor to my house. That’s a good man, yeah.”

  “Jimmy Nightingale doesn’t have any authority over the sheriff’s department.”

  “He’s on our side. Ain’t nobody else ever he’ped us. Not since Huey Long ain’t nobody he’ped us.”

  What do you say to that? “It was good seeing you, Babette. If I can do anything for you, you have my card.”

  “I said somet’ing wrong, huh?”

  “Not you. But the rest of us have. Je vot’ voir plus tarde, petite chère.”

  But she belonged to a generation who no longer spoke French of any kind, even what we called français creole or français neg, and she had no idea what I was saying in either French or English.

  * * *

  JIMMY NIGHTINGALE WAS holding a rally that night at the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, and I talked Clete into going with me. The American South has a long history of demagoguery. Budd Schulberg coined the term “demagogue in denim” for his character Lonesome Rhodes, portrayed by Andy Griffith in the film adaptation A Face in the Crowd. Robert Penn Warren, who taught at LSU, won the Pulitzer for his creation of a fictionalized Huey Long in All the King’s Men. But it would be a serious mistake in perception to join Jimmy at the hip with a collection of sweaty peckerwoods and white minstrel performers who majored in getting drunk, race-baiting, quoting from the Bible, and screwing the maid.

  The Cajun Dome was overflowing. Jimmy walked onto the stage ten minutes lat
e in a white suit and cordovan boots and a dark blue shirt open at the collar, a short-brim pearl-gray Stetson gripped in his hand, as though he hadn’t had time to hang it. The crowd went wild. In front, some rose to their feet. Then the entire auditorium rose, stomping their feet and pounding the backs of the seats with such violence that the walls shook.

  I thought of Hitler’s arrivals, the deliberate delay, the trimotor silver-sided Junkers droning in the distance from afar and then appearing in the searchlights like a mythic winged creature descending from Olympus.

  Clete took a flask from inside his coat, unscrewed the cap with his thumb, letting it swing loose from its tiny chain. He took a hit of Jack. “I think I’m going to start my own country and secede from the Union.”

  “Quiet,” I whispered.

  “Fuck it,” he replied.

  “There’s ladies here,” a man in front of us said.

  Clete looked steadily at the back of the man’s head. “Excuse me.”

  The man turned his head halfway and nodded.

  Jimmy was a master. He seemed to float like a dove on a rosy glow of love and warmth that radiated from the people below. He belonged to them, and they belonged to him, like Plotinian emanations of each other. He gave voice to those who had none, and to those who had lost their jobs because of bankers and Wall Street stockbrokers and the NAFTA politicians who had made a sieve of our borders and allowed millions of illegals into our towns and cities. He never mentioned his political opponents; he didn’t have to. One boyish grin from Jimmy Nightingale could have people laughing at his challengers without knowing why, as though they and Jimmy were one mind and one heart.

  Was he race-baiting or appealing to the xenophobia and nativism that goes back to the Irish immigration of the 1840s? Not in the mind of his audience. Jimmy was telling it like it is.

  His adherents wore baseball caps and T-shirts and tennis shoes and dresses made in Thailand. They were the bravest people on earth, bar none. They got incinerated in oil-well blowouts, crippled by tongs and chains on the drill floor, and hit by lightning laying pipe in a swamp in the middle of an electric storm, and they did it all without compliant. If you wanted to win a revolution, this was the bunch to get on your side. The same could be said if you wanted to throw the Constitution into the trash can.

  Clete took a small pair of binoculars out of his coat pocket and scanned the audience. He handed the binoculars to me. “Check out the top row, straight across.”

  I adjusted the lenses. Bobby Earl was sitting against the wall, scrunched between a fat man and a woman with a barrel of popcorn propped between her thighs, the spotlights above him smoking in the haze gathering under the roof. The sloped shoulders and wan expression and crooked necktie and distended stomach were a study in despair and failure. His attention was fixed on the audience, not the stage, as though the people around him didn’t realize he was in their midst, ready to reclaim the glorious vision that was his invention, not this pretender’s.

  I handed the binoculars back to Clete. “Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in America.”

  “Richard Nixon must not have heard him,” Clete said.

  The air-conditioning wasn’t working properly. People began fanning themselves, getting up for water or cold drinks, blotting their foreheads. I’d had enough of Jimmy Nightingale and wanted to leave, but Clete had found another object of interest with his binoculars. He stared through them at a spot by the rafters, in a corner bright and hot with humidity and motes of shiny dust.

  “You got a number for security?”

  “No,” I said. “What do you see?”

  “A guy who looks like a smiling dildo. He’s carrying a box about four feet long and four inches wide.”

  The man in front of us turned around again. He was Clete’s height, well groomed, thick-shouldered, a flag pin in his lapel, indignation branded on his face.“I’m about to have you removed.”

  Clete’s eyes were round green stones. “What for?”

  “You used a word about a certain female instrument.”

  “How about this? Shut your fucking mouth.” Clete handed me the binoculars. “In the corner, ten o’clock.”

  I looked but saw nothing. Clete took back the binoculars and looked again. “He’s gone.”

  “We’ll tell security on the way out.”

  The shots were rapid, two pops, then nothing. One blew apart a vase full of flowers by Jimmy’s foot; the other hit the staff of an American flag, cutting it in half, toppling the flag on a plastic bush. Hundreds of people ducked under the seats; some ran. Jimmy didn’t move. Instead, he detached the microphone from the stand and raised his left hand in calming fashion. “It’s all right, friends. Do not panic. I’m fine. Look at me. They can’t stop us. Do you hear me? Sit down. We’re the people. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come can separate us from the love of God.”

  The response was thunderous, on the level of an earthquake, an exorcism of fear and even mortality itself, an affirmation that the man they had chosen was indeed the apotheosis of all that was good. I opened my badge and held it high above my head and, with Clete behind me, began working my way up the stairs on the far side of the building. The entire audience was on its feet and shouting incoherently. Down below, the spotlights glowed on Jimmy’s white suit with an iridescence just this side of ethereal.

  THIS TIME, THE shooter had left his brass, a pair of .223 casings that were probably from a scoped rifle modeled on the old M1 carbine. I picked them up with a pencil and put them into an empty candy box I found on the floor and turned them over to a Lafayette police detective. Clete described the man he had seen with the elongated cardboard carton, and that was the end of our official participation in the attempted assassination of Jimmy Nightingale.

  Clete was silent most of the way to New Iberia. We were in the Caddy, the top up. He turned on the radio, then clicked it off and huffed air out his nose.

  “What’s eating you?” I said.

  “I don’t buy what we saw.”

  I knew what he was going to say. But I didn’t want to taint his perceptions by speaking first.

  “Sociopaths are all the same,” he said. “Every one of them is vain. They’ll go to the injection table rather than admit an imperfection.”

  “Are you talking about the shooter or Nightingale?”

  “Our .223 man put one round in a glass vase that was no more than five inches across. The second clipped the flagstaff dead center. He hit two small objects three seconds apart from seventy yards but couldn’t nail Nightingale? Who’s kidding who?”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “You think Lafayette PD or the state police will pick up on that?”

  “People believe what they want to.”

  “Nightingale is a hypocrite. He brought immigrants from Costa Rica to work in his casinos and hotels.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Cletus.”

  “No, I’m not. You’re always making excuses for this guy.”

  “Heroes are hard to find these days. That’s why we have the bargain-basement variety.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “How about Levon Broussard? I always respected him. Now he’s making a film with Tony Nine Ball, and Alafair is working with them.”

  Clete took out his flask and chugged it to the bottom. “I don’t like to drink in front of you, Streak, but sometimes that’s the only way I can put up with this crap.”

  * * *

  I HAD A professional and ethical problem Monday morning. The previous day, in front of St. Edward’s Church, Babette Latiolais had in effect told me that Spade Labiche had struck her in the face. She also had told me that she would not file charges. If I reported Labiche to Helen, she would take him to task, and he would lie and later slap Babette all over her house.

  I went into his cubbyhole of an office. “I’m going to a noon meeting. How about joining me?”<
br />
  He was drinking coffee, one leg resting across the trash can. “I’m boxed in today.”

  “You’d be doing me a big favor, Spade.”

  “How am I doing you a favor by going to an A.A. meeting?”

  “It’s called the ninth step. Making amends to people we’ve hurt. I attacked you. I have to make up for it.”

  “All sins are forgiven. I hear you were at the Cajun Dome when someone tried to grease Nightingale.”

  “Clete Purcel and I were there.”

  “I called it, didn’t I? I knew somebody would try to knock him off.”

  “You knew what you were talking about. How about the meeting? Be a sport. It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?”

  “You’ve got a brick for a head. Let me take a piss.”

  The meeting was in the back of an electrical shop by one of the drawbridges, the windows painted over. The attendees were mostly working people. The room smelled of dust and old rags and machine oil that had soaked into workbenches. Before Labiche sat down, he flicked his handkerchief several times on the seat of the chair.

  When the leader of the meeting asked newcomers to introduce themselves by first name only and not to put anything into the basket, Labiche did as requested and then began clipping his nails. It wasn’t long before I noticed something wrong. Two black women who were regulars and spoke often at meetings were silent, their eyes turned inward, their bodies shrunken, as though they were trying to make themselves smaller. Labiche reset his watch, sucked his teeth, and looked sleepily into space while an elderly man spoke of his wife’s death. Then Labiche went to the restroom, tucking in his shirt with his thumbs as he walked. One of the silent black women left in a hurry through a side door. The other bent deeper into herself, her eyes lidded. When Labiche returned, he stank of cigarette smoke.

  After the “Our Father,” he helped stack a couple of chairs and followed me outside. The heat was ferocious, the wind like a blowtorch.

  “How’d you like it?” I asked.

  “Good stuff, but I don’t think it’s for me, Robo. I know I got kind of screwed up and depressed for a while and was talking a little crazy, but I’m okay now.”