Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  “Would you like a highball or a glass of wine, Detective Robicheaux?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “On the clock, are you?”

  “Yes, I must be going. It’s nice meeting you in person.”

  She didn’t reply, as though I hadn’t spoken. The wind picked up, sprinkling leaves that were as hard as the shells of crustaceans on the grass. It was cold in the shade, the light on the four-o’clocks and caladiums harsh and brittle. We were in the midst of spring, yet I felt a sense of mortality I couldn’t explain.

  Her face was impossible to read. She was one of those women who seemed to choose solitude and plainness over beauty, and anger over happiness.

  “You ever meet a guy named Kevin Penny?” I said.

  “Our convict gardener?” she replied. “I fired him.”

  I looked at Jimmy. He shrugged and turned up his palms. “I don’t know the name of every guy who cuts the grass, Dave.”

  “What is this about?” Emmeline said.

  “Veracity,” I said.

  “I don’t care for your tone,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you. It bothers me, too.” I pointed my finger at Jimmy Nightingale. “I think you’re slick.”

  “I’m dishonest?”

  “Take it any way you want.”

  “You’ve got some damn nerve,” he said.

  “Tell it to the eight murdered women in Jeff Davis Parish,” I replied.

  “What do they have to do with me?”

  “I heard you hung around Bobby Earl because you wanted his mailing list. I never believed that,” I said.

  “It’s politics. This is Louisiana.”

  “I remember many situations when I said it was just Vietnam.”

  Jimmy pulled the cork from a green half-empty bottle of wine. “Here’s to neocolonialism everywhere.”

  I wasn’t up to his cynicism. I looked at the oaks, the moss lifting in the wind, purple dust rising from a cane field, Bayou Teche glinting in the sun like a Byzantine shield. La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die, the place for which there was no answer or cure.

  I said nothing more and walked to my vehicle, rude or not.

  RECOVERING ALCOHOLICS HAVE ways of setting themselves up. Some get the toxins out of their system and stop attending meetings. Maybe they hang with the old crowd. They drop by a saloon to watch a football game on a Saturday afternoon. They convince themselves their problems had to do with excess rather than compulsion and metabolic addiction and a deep-seated neurosis armor-plated in the unconscious. Or they nurse resentment and fuel their anger on a daily basis, like a primitive fur-clad creature methodically dropping sticks into a fire.

  Or maybe they want to cancel their whole ticket but are afraid to lose their soul. If they’re in this category, they’ll commit suicide in an incremental fashion, one glass or bottle at a time. And if the process isn’t fast enough, they will put themselves in dangerous situations involving guns and knives and people who belong in steel cages.

  I went to a meeting at the Episcopalian cottage on Center Street, across from old New Iberia High. When the moderator asked if anyone was attending A.A. for the first time, or if anyone was returning from a slip and wanted a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, I let my face go empty and stared at the floor in the semidarkness. At the end of the meeting, I said little or nothing to friends with whom I had been in the program for years, and drove to my house in a heavy white fog that had moved in from the Gulf, and parked my truck in the porte cochere and went inside and sat in the living room in the dark, the television off, the silence as loud as a scream.

  The operative acronym for every A.A. member is HALT, which means don’t get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. I was all of those. I called Clete’s cell phone, which went immediately to voicemail. I didn’t want the food in my icebox. I woke lifeless and exhausted with every sunrise. My hands opened and closed at my sides for no reason. I deliberately revisited memories of a human face dissolving in a bloody mist when I squeezed off round after round from my army-issue 1911-model .45.

  I’m not proud of any of these things. I hated them then; I hate them now. But they live in me like a snake that slowly swallows its prey, compressing it into a canister of despair and pain.

  I went into the kitchen and filled a large glass with tap water and drank it to the bottom. In the darkness I heard the claws of an animal scratching at the screen. I set the glass quietly in the sink and went through the mudroom and opened the screen door. A raccoon that must have weighted twenty-five pounds jumped from the windowsill and thumped on the ground, then scampered through the leaves past Tripod’s old hutch and disappeared inside the fog.

  I walked down the slope, looking for him. The air was cold, the fog hanging in huge clouds on the bayou and in the trees. I heard a splash, like a gator slapping its tail. I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it on the ground. The tracks of a raccoon and probably a possum or an armadillo were stenciled along the mudflat. The tracks disappeared into the cattails. Farther down, inside clouds of fog that rose four feet above the water, I heard a soft knocking sound, like a friend at the door in the early hours. I shined the light ahead of me. The tide was coming in, and an unmoored pirogue had floated up the bayou and lodged against a decayed and collapsed dock at the foot of my property.

  I picked up a fallen tree branch and hooked it on the pirogue’s bow and scraped it onto the bank. There was a paddle inside, an empty rucksack, a minnow bucket, a newspaper that was two weeks old, and a fish stringer. My earliest memories of my father were fishing with him in a pirogue. There is no more emblematic symbol of life on Bayou Teche than the humble pirogue.

  I stepped into the pirogue and steadied my weight, then eased down on the wood seat. The fog was so thick that the lights in the houses along the bayou, even the floodlamps in the backyard of the Shadows and the warning lights on the drawbridge at Burke Street, were hardly more than smudges. I shone the penlight on the rucksack again. A pint bottle of brandy lay in a half inch of rainwater. I touched it with the penlight beam and watched its color flare on my hand and wrist. I pushed with the paddle until the pirogue swung into the current and began to drift toward the bridge and one of the places that had been waiting for me since I was a child, when, in my innocence, I believed the paradisiacal world into which I had been born would always be there for me.

  * * *

  THIS PARTICULAR BAR-AND-GRILL was located on the water, but because of the fog and the intermittent rain, the chairs and tables on the deck had been stacked, and all the patrons had gone inside and crowded into the bar. The windows were lighted, the glass beaded, the patrons happy and warm, safe from the elements. The only problem I had with this place upstream from the drawbridge was that almost everyone there knew me and my history.

  When I opened the door, the bartender looked at me without speaking. I pointed at the men’s room. He smiled. “Yeah, go ahead, Dave,” he said.

  I went into the cubicle inside the restroom and shut the door. I waited until I was sure the room was empty, then exited the cubicle and clicked off the light to lessen my visibility and opened the restroom door and went to the end of the bar in the shadows. A young barmaid I didn’t recognize was filling the beer box.

  “One of those and two shots of Jack on shaved ice,” I said. “In fact, make that two doubles. I got a friend coming.”

  She was pretty and young and had a small red mouth and the amber-colored hair characteristic of many Cajun women. “Aren’t you . . .”

  “Aren’t I who?”

  “You know, a policeman. You work in the big building on the bayou. I seen you when I paid a traffic ticket there.”

  “Yeah, that was probably me. I’m kind of in a hurry.”

  “Don’t set your pants on fire, no.”

  I stood by the stool. I looked at my hands. I looked down at the bar rail. I could feel a hundred eyes burrowing in
to my back or the side of my face. When I looked up, no one was paying me any attention. “Miss, I’d really appreciate it if you’d hurry.”

  “Yes, suh, coming up,” she said.

  After I finished both glasses of whiskey, chasing each with Heineken, I thought my knees would fold.

  “You gonna be all right?” the barmaid said.

  “As right as rain.”

  “You don’t look it, no.”

  “You’re an honest lady.”

  “No, I ain’t. I just don’t want to have to clean up the flo’.”

  “See, that’s honesty.”

  She leaned in. “You ain’t driving, you?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Babette Latiolais.”

  “I wish there were a million like you, Miss Babette. Give me a Heineken for the road.”

  I pushed a twenty to her with the heel of my hand and left the change on the bar, then went outside into the fog and rain and started walking home. The drawbridge at Burke Street was in the air, a tugboat working its way up the bayou, its running lights on. I waved at the man in the pilothouse. I saw him draw in on his pipe and wave back. I wanted to have a drink with him. I wanted to be on his boat and sail back into time and find a place where there were no clocks or calendars. I wanted to find the vortex that some say is the birth canal and others say is the conduit to eternity. I wanted to find the cowled figure that awaits us all and wrap myself in his cloak.

  I remember reaching my front yard and starting my truck with the intention of driving to St. Martinville, the village where the ghost of Evangeline supposedly waited for her lover, Gabriel, under a spreading oak on the banks of Bayou Teche. My next memory is of headlights in my mirror and the grinding sounds of a vehicle on my bumper.

  * * *

  I WOKE IN my skivvies, on top of the sheets, the sun in my eyes. When I sat up, a wave of nausea drained through my body. My elbows hurt and my knuckles were scraped, and one fingernail was broken all the way to the cuticle. My clothes were on the floor. The sleeves of my windbreaker looked like they had been raked by barbed wire. I threw up in the bathroom, the backs of my legs shaking.

  I got into the shower and turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, filling the room with steam, boiling the grease out of my pores, as though trying to scour an obscene presence from my skin. I touched a painful bump under the white patch in my hair and another bump on the back of my head. I shaved and brushed my teeth and gargled with antiseptic and tried to remember where I had gone and what I had done the previous night. My memory would go no deeper than the blinding glare in the rearview mirror, the smash of a bumper against the rear of my truck, and my head snapping back.

  No, I remembered something else. A man’s face. His teeth were wide-set, his throat and cheeks patinaed with whiskers that were as stiff as emery-wheel filings.

  I looked into the bathroom mirror. My face was bloodless and gaunt and dissolute, my eyes swollen, my hair a tangle of snakes. I scrubbed my face with cold water and looked again and saw an image that could be compared only with the severed head of a Mongol warrior.

  I dressed in a long-sleeve red silk shirt and gray tie and gray slacks and oxblood loafers and got to the department at five to eight. I had never felt so sick. I filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee and burned my mouth on the first sip. Helen stopped me in the hallway before I could make it to my office, where I hoped to recover in solitude from my hangover. “Drink up, Pops. We’ve got a homicide.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Just this side of the St. Martin line.”

  “A shooting?”

  “Mixed reports. The coroner is on his way. Dump the coffee.”

  “I’ve got to use the men’s room.”

  “You don’t have one at home?”

  “I got a bug.”

  Her eyes wandered over my face. “I’ll bring a cruiser around. Get your shit together.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You haven’t been fooling anyone.”

  She walked away, her back stiff with anger.

  * * *

  HELEN DROVE UP the two-lane toward St. Martinville without speaking, the flasher rippling. I looked out the window at the cane fields flying by, the sun spangling through the canopy of oaks that arched over the highway. “Who’s at the scene?” I asked.

  “Spade Labiche.”

  “What’s he doing out here?”

  “He was investigating a domestic battery charge. He got patched in.” She waited for me to reply. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I don’t have an opinion.”

  “Dave, what is wrong with you? Why not put one in your mouth and be done with it?”

  “I’m going to hit a noon meeting.”

  “What you’re going to do is your goddamn job.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I’ll stop the cruiser and stomp the shit out of you.”

  “I believe you. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t have words for how I feel. You break my heart.”

  I knew I would hear that last one in my sleep.

  We turned onto a road that made a wide bend through sugarcane fields and cattle pasture, and passed clumps of pecan and oak trees and boxlike farmhouses and trailers and a convenience store that sold live bait. Just past the convenience store, a pale blue pickup truck was parked in knee-high weeds thirty feet beyond a broken wire fence. Both doors were shut. Crime scene tape had been strung from the fence posts to a solitary oak beyond the truck. The tape was bouncing in the wind.

  Spade Labiche came from a big family in New Orleans that made a living out of law enforcement and jails. They were either cops, chasers in the Marine Corps, hacks in Angola or Huntsville or Parchman, or bail bondsmen. Without criminals, they would not have had a livelihood. Spade Labiche had worked vice at Miami-Dade and claimed he had resigned because he was homesick for Louisiana.

  He had started off in uniform with our department and only recently made plainclothes. Twice, women of color had filed sexual complaints against him, but the complaints were dropped without explanation. Labiche was standing just outside the tape, wearing an ink-blue tie sprayed with tiny white stars and a suit that was as bright as tin. A pair of latex gloves hung out of his side pocket. He lit a cigarette with a match, cupping the flame in the wind; normally, he carried a gold lighter, because there was little he did that wasn’t ostentatious. He was blond and trim and worked out every night at Baron’s Health Club; his eyes were almost colorless, like glass with a tinge of blue.

  “The body is on the other side,” he said. “You might check the window on the driver’s side first.”

  “Where’s the coroner?” Helen said.

  “Taking a whiz in the convenience store,” he said.

  “Did he examine the body?”

  “Yeah,” Labiche said.

  “What did he say?” Helen asked.

  “Nothing. He went blank on me. The way guys like that do.”

  “Which kind of guys?” I asked.

  He fixed his gaze on my face, a curl at the edge of his mouth. “Unusual ones.”

  Helen and I put on latex gloves. I kept my hands down, out of sight, and tried not to flinch when I pulled the latex over my knuckles. The glass had been knocked out of the window. There was a ragged line of shards sticking out of the jamb, like shark’s teeth.

  “There’s glass all over the dashboard and seat and on the weeds,” Labiche said. “There’s some pieces in the vic’s hair, too.”

  “Did you run the tag?” Helen said.

  “The truck is registered to T. J. Dartez,” he said.

  I kept my face empty, my arms folded on my chest. The front bumper was made from welded pipes. One taillight was broken. “Where are the paramedics?” I said.

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “How about it on the language?” I said.

  I squatted down by the body. Dartez lay on his back, his shirt
front cut and bloodied perpendicularly. His teeth were knocked out; one eye had eight-balled. My head was spinning as though I were in free fall.

  Labiche had thrown his cigarette onto the road and stepped over the tape and was standing behind me. The weeds around the body were stippled with blood. The ground smelled sour from either night damp or the blood that had seeped into the soil. The sun was hot on my neck.

  “He’s the guy who was in the accident with your wife?” Labiche said.

  “That’s him.”

  “Tough break.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I think the accident report sucked.”

  I stood up, my knees hurting. “I didn’t hear you say anything about it at the time.”

  “I’m still a new guy. I don’t express every opinion I might have.” He turned his head toward the convenience store. “Here comes queer-bait and the paramedics.”

  “What did you call him?”

  “Nothing. It was a joke.”

  The coroner’s name was Cormac Watts. He was a crew-cut likable young guy from Virginia who wore seersucker pants high on his hips, long-sleeve white shirts, and a bow tie without a coat. He looked put together from sticks, with snowshoes for feet. Clete said Cormac made him think of a well-dressed scarecrow stepping over the rows in a tobacco field.

  Helen had been on her cell phone. She folded it and stuck it into her pocket. Her breasts swelled against her shirt when she took a breath. “That was admissions at Iberia General. Dartez’s wife had to be sedated. The kids are with a social worker.”

  “Who told her?” I asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe we have a witness. Get on it, will you, Spade?”

  “You want me to go to Iberia General?”

  “No, go to the convenience store first. See if there are any witnesses. Then go to Iberia General.”

  “I’m assigned the case, though?”

  “That’s not what’s on my mind at the moment.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Look, I know y’all were a team. I’m not trying to bust up anything.”

  Helen’s fists were propped on her hips, her face pointed at the ground. “You did a good job. Call me from the hospital.” She waited until Labiche was out of earshot. “I don’t know if I want you on this one.”