The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  “I saw it all. Approximately a hundred and fifty other people did, too.”

  “My daughter took the screenwriting job because she respects you and your work. Her faith was repaid by Nemo’s insults and his attempt to degrade her. To my knowledge, you didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

  “I didn’t know about it.”

  “You do now.”

  “I’m supposed to kick him off the set? He’s the goddamn producer.”

  I could feel my anger returning, my palms tingling, a dryness in my mouth, a flame inching its way across the lining of my stomach. “What’s wrong with you, Levon? You’ve devoted your entire life to good causes. How could you hook up with a guy like Tony Nine Ball?”

  “It’s what the situation demanded.”

  “You want him to rig a jury for you? He’ll end up owning your soul.”

  “I didn’t kill Kevin Penny. A lot of people believe I did. Some have even congratulated me.”

  I stepped closer to him. I saw Rowena walk into the yard, a flowering tree in bloom behind her.

  “Look me straight in the face and tell me you didn’t do it,” I said. “Your prints were on the drill only because you tried to save his life. Tell me that.”

  “It’s as you say.” There was not a flutter of emotion in his face or his eyes.

  “He raped your wife. He put his mouth all over her body. He put his seed in her.”

  “You want me to knock you down?”

  “You don’t like the imagery? What do you think your trial is going to be like?”

  “Tell Alafair I’m sorry. Ask her to come back on the set.”

  “Dream on.”

  “What can I say?”

  “The truth.”

  “White Doves at Morning is one of my best books and one of the least read. I wanted to see it on the screen. Nemo obtained the funding. If I had gotten it myself, I would have ended up dealing with the same Hollywood people he deals with. When you get off the phone with them, you want to clean your ear with baby wipes.”

  “Who killed Penny?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “There’s something you’re hiding. I don’t buy your story about the drill. It’s too coincidental that you show up just after someone turns him into Swiss cheese.”

  “You never mention Jimmy Nightingale or his sister,” he said. “He’s headed for the Senate and maybe even bigger things. He’s a fascist who’s lying to all these poor people who think he’s going to make their lives better. But you’re worried about justice for the guy who raped my wife and maybe killed some of the Jeff Davis Eight.”

  “Seen any good movies?” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  But it wasn’t over. Rowena walked across the grass to the edge of the driveway, wearing jeans and a beige T-shirt with paint on it and no bra. “Don’t talk to him like that, Levon. Come in, Mr. Robicheaux. Have some tea with us.”

  She lived up to her name, right out of Sir Walter Scott. “You’re a grand lady, madam,” I said. “All the best to both of you.”

  On the way home, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I flipped it open. The caller was Melvin LeBlanc, the physician.

  “What’s the haps, Mel?” I said.

  “I’m at Iberia General. The head nurse thinks you should get over here.”

  “Regarding what?”

  “Spade Labiche. She says he keeps repeating the word ‘Robo.’ Mean anything?”

  * * *

  I PARKED UNDER the oaks in front of the hospital and went inside. A nurse walked with me to the ICU. “Is he a friend of yours, Detective?”

  “We work together.”

  “I wondered if he had any immediate family in the area.”

  “Maybe in New Orleans.”

  “I see.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “If he belongs to a church, this would be an appropriate time for his pastor to visit.”

  I went inside the room. The left side of his face was encased in bandages, except for the eye. He was breathing through his mouth, his lips formed in a cone as though he had eaten hot food and was trying to cool his tongue.

  “It’s me, Spade,” I said. “Dave Robicheaux.”

  He seemed not to hear me. The fingers of his right hand twitched.

  “I’m sorry this happened to you, partner,” I said. “You got a bad deal.” No reply, no reaction. I looked over my shoulder. The nurse had gone. “You want to tell me something?”

  His fingers moved again, up and down, as though he were beckoning. I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. “Tell me what it is.”

  His breath contained a stench like decomposition in a shallow burial or a body bag in a tropical country. “You.”

  “You what?” I said.

  “You want save . . .” His voice trailed off.

  The neurologist had told me his hearing was destroyed. But maybe that wasn’t the case.

  “Give it another try,” I said.

  “Dartez . . . Seizure.”

  I took a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his spittle from my cheek. I eased my hand under his and held it. “If you can’t do it, Spade, you can’t do it. In your mind, just tell the Man Upstairs you’re sorry for the mistakes you made. Don’t worry about anything else.”

  I thought his left eye had been blinded. But it looked straight into mine. His voice was hoarse and coated with phlegm, the words rising from his throat like bubbles of foul air. “Epilepsy . . . he was strangling . . . something was in his throat . . . you tried to save him.”

  “Go on.”

  I felt his hand go limp in mine. “Hang in there, Spade. Come on, bud. Don’t slip loose.”

  If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint, and for just a moment they seem to recede from your vision and somehow become lighter, as though the soul has departed or perhaps because they have surrendered a burden they told no one of.

  I had brought nothing to record his words, but I didn’t care. I owed Spade a debt and wanted to repay it. I removed my religious medal and silver chain from my neck and poured it into his palm and folded his fingers on it and placed his hand and arm on his chest.

  I walked down the corridor and ran into the nurse by the elevator.

  “Is everything all right, Detective Robicheaux?”

  “Just fine,” I said.

  “Is he resting all right? It’s time for his sponge bath. Then we’ll be transferring him to hospice.”

  “I think Spade will be okay,” I said.

  “I’m sure he appreciated your visit. The poor man. What a horrible fate. It’s funny the things they say to you, isn’t it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “At the end, men usually ask for their mothers. But he asked for you. You must be very close.”

  I drove home and fixed a cup of café au lait in a big mug and sat on the back steps. Snuggs flopped down on my lap, then sharpened his claws on the inside of my thigh. I set him down next to me, and like two old gentlemen, we watched a rainstorm march across the wetlands and let loose a torrent of hailstones that danced like mothballs all over the yard.

  THE STORM CONTINUED through the night, filling our rain gutters with pine needles and leaves, flooding the yard and most of East Main. The Teche was high and yellow at dawn, lapping into the canebrakes and cypress knees along the banks, the sun pink and the sky strung with white clouds and patches of blue. The trees were dripping audibly and throbbing with birds. It was a grand way to start the day, in spite of all that had happened.

  Helen caught me at 8:06 A.M. in the corridor outside her office. “Inside, bwana.”

  “Tony Nine Ball is upset?”

  “No, half of St. Mary Parish is.”

  I walked ahead of her. She slammed the door behind us. “What the hell were you th
inking?”

  “He told Alafair she probably gave good head.”

  Her face went dead. Her early days at NOPD were not easy. She was not only a woman, she was a bisexual woman. The cruelty and abuse by a detective named Nate Baxter set new standards. He ended up facedown in a plate of linguini in a family restaurant on Canal.

  “I’d do it over if I had to,” I said. “Fire me if you want. Nemo is a bucket of shit who should have been poured down the honey hole a long time ago.”

  She sat behind her desk and picked at a thumbnail.

  “This isn’t about Nemo?” I said.

  “Labiche died last night. The head nurse says you were there.”

  “I was.”

  “And you knew he died?”

  “Yes, he died with his hand in mine.”

  “And you didn’t bother to call in? Or say what you were doing there? Or what he might have said before he caught the bus?”

  “What he told me won’t change anything,” I said. “I didn’t have my recorder.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Dartez was having an epileptic seizure, and I tried to save him. There was something in his throat. That’s about it.”

  “Jesus Christ, that’s why you dragged him out the window,” she said. “He had the plastic filter of a cigar lodged in his throat.”

  “That’s it. Then I think Penny came up behind me and hit me with a rock or a chunk of concrete.”

  “Labiche mentioned Penny?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing to suggest who might have sent Penny after you?”

  “I believe it was Nemo.”

  “You’re probably right. This won’t get you off the hook, though, will it?”

  “I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

  She opened her desk drawer and took out my medal and silver chain and set them on the corner of her desk. “A nurse brought this by about fifteen minutes ago. She said you must have left it in Labiche’s hand, because nobody else was in the room with him.”

  I picked up the chain and put it around my neck and dropped the medal inside my shirt. “Thanks.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Pops.”

  * * *

  IN A SEEDY motel north of the Four Corners area of Lafayette, Chester Wimple sat on the side of his bed and stared at the window shade. The bottoms of his tennis shoes barely touched the floor. He wore a white painter’s cap with a long bill and a high square top, and brand-new pants that fitted his legs like buckets, and a stiff short-sleeved checked shirt, and a clip-on bow tie. When he tried to rethink the events in the Labiche house, his mouth and jaw contorted as though a puppeteer were playing a joke with his face.

  He had never messed up a hit, or left loose ends, or allowed emotion to sully the virtuous nature of his work. Tidiness and cleanliness were his hallmarks. The left hand of God could not be otherwise. The words “creepy little snerd” crawled like worms in his ears.

  On the bedspread were his .357, a scoped .223 carbine, a Beretta nine-millimeter—the earlier model with the fourteen-round magazine—and a World War II British commando knife, the blade double-edged, narrow, shining with an oily-blue liquidity, tapering into a dagger point. The steel was cold and hard when he picked it up and closed his palm on the handle, his lips parting, his phallus tingling inside his boxer shorts. This was the only weapon in his possession that had the personal touch, that brought him into eye contact with the target and allowed him a guilty pleasure not unlike the impure thoughts he was not supposed to have.

  Yesterday he had received a new set of index cards at the general-delivery window. The drawings on each card and the names of the next targets caused him no difficulty. He did not know them or why they needed to be removed from the landscape, which, for Chester, was an antediluvian world governed by raptors and pterodactyls. The flowing calligraphy on the first card was the issue. The words seemed to contain a trap, the way words were used to trap him when he was a child. They made his eyes jitter and the window shade change from a warm yellow to a dull red that pulsed as though a fire were burning on the other side.

  The note read:

  My dearest Chester,

  You have been a good boy. Don’t ever let anyone say you are not. But I have the feeling you have been spying on me. You mustn’t do this. We cannot be together again until our work is over. Please don’t be offended. You know how much I love and care for you. You are the light of my life. Had we not had each other, we would not have survived.

  We’ll be together soon. Just keep being the sweet boy you are and stop these evil people from preying on our friends and children who cannot defend themselves.

  She had not signed the note or even used an initial. He wanted to cry. Not out of joy, either. She did not want to see him.

  He pushed the point of the commando knife into the skin behind his chin, forcing his head back until his neck ached. What if he shoved the blade to the hilt? Would it reach the brain? What was the poem she used to read to him? He could remember only pieces. Tiger! tiger! burning bright. In the forests of the night . . . What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?

  He had thought she was talking about him and why he was different from other children.

  “Oh, no, no,” she said. “You’re a good boy, Chester. This poem is about bad people, the kind who have hurt us.”

  At that moment, he knew no power on earth would ever separate them.

  He replaced the rubber band around the index cards and flipped through the images with his thumb. Two more targets, people he knew nothing about. What had they done? Actually, he didn’t care. If they were on the cards, there was good reason. They knew it, too. He saw the regret in their eyes before he sent them to that place where they couldn’t hurt people anymore, and he felt no guilt about their passing. He gave ice cream to children with a glad heart. That’s who Chester Wimple was.

  But something else was bothering him. He was losing his objectivity, and his motivations were becoming impure. For personal reasons, he wanted to do the man with the convex face and the peroxided shoe-brush haircut and the muscles that glistened with suntan oil. The man in the pool with Emmeline Nightingale, the man whose body fluids floated in the water and touched hers. He wanted to do this man on his own, up close with the commando knife, or with a rifle from afar so the soft-nosed, jacketed round would be toppling when it keyholed through the face, all of it caught inside the cylindrical simplicity of the telescopic sight.

  Chester turned on the television set and stared at cartoons for the next two hours, sitting on the side of the bed, his mouth open, his face as insentient as a bowl of porridge.

  * * *

  CLETE WAS NOT only a member of our family, he would lay down his life for Alafair or me. Which also meant he inserted himself into situations without consulting anyone. On Tuesday, he and Homer went fishing in St. Mary Parish, then drove top-down to the movie set behind Albania Plantation. Levon and Rowena Broussard were standing behind a camera down the bayou. The actors and the crew were just breaking for lunch. Tony Nine Ball was nowhere in sight. Clete removed his porkpie hat. “My name is Clete Purcel, Mr. Broussard. Got a minute?”

  “You don’t have to tell me who you are,” Levon said.

  Clete put his hat back on and looked at the bayou and the hundreds of robins in the trees. “This is my pal Homer.”

  “Homer Penny?” Levon said.

  Homer looked at his feet.

  “I’m his guardian,” Clete said. “Unofficial but guardian just the same. He’s never seen a movie set.”

  Clete could hear the wind in the silence.

  “How are you, Homer?” Rowena said, and extended her hand. The scars where she’d cut herself were red and as thick as night crawlers.

  “Dave and Alafair Robicheaux don’t know I’m here,” Clete said.

  “You’re on a mission of mercy?” Levon said.

  “I was an extra and did security on a couple of films but didn’t have my name o
n the credits. I didn’t think you’d mind. I mean us being here and all.”

  “Welcome,” Levon said.

  “I wanted to ask a favor, too.”

  “I never would have guessed,” Levon said.

  “I have a Frisbee over there on the table, Homer,” Rowena said. “Why don’t you and I toss a couple?”

  Homer looked down the slope at a row of cannons and actors in kepis and butternut uniforms. “That’d be great,” he said.

  Levon waited until they were out of earshot. “You’re here about Alafair?”

  “She worked hard on the script,” Clete said. “It wasn’t for the money, either.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Tell her you want her back.”

  “She can come back any time she likes.”

  “That’s not the same as apologizing for what happened and telling her you appreciate her work.”

  Levon took out his cell phone and found a number in his contacts. His call to Alafair went straight to voicemail. “This is Levon. Tony is a jerk. I need you here, Alafair. Your script is beautiful. I don’t want amateurs messing it up. I sent you two e-mails. Call me.” He closed his cell. “Anything else?”

  “I sent the Nightingale chauffeur to you. A guy named Swede Jensen. I hope you didn’t mind.”

  “He’s a Confederate soldier. He’s down by the bayou now.”

  “No kidding?” Clete said.

  “I’d like to eat lunch and get back to work.”

  “Sure,” Clete said.

  “Do you and Homer want to join us?”

  Clete saw a red Frisbee sail over the cannon and Homer jump in the air to catch it, his face split with a smile. “That’d be nice.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT THE rain came again, mixed with hail and bursts of tree-lashing wind. Clete ordered in a pizza, and he and Homer watched My Darling Clementine on Clete’s television set. At the end of the film, when Henry Fonda leaves the woman by the side of the road and rides away into the Arizona wastelands, Homer’s eyes turned wet, and he looked at Clete for an explanation, either for the film or for his emotions.

  “See, it’s about the fact that a guy like Wyatt Earp wouldn’t ever be able to enjoy a normal life,” Clete said.