Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  I had seen her punch the heavy bag at Red’s Health Club with the kind of power and dedication that makes adventurous men think twice. Jimmy Nightingale was not a large man. She said he put a pillowcase over her head and wedged his knee between her legs and worked off her undergarment with one hand. She said she cried out and told him to stop, even begged. I wanted to believe her. I hated cops and judges and prosecutors who sided with a rapist, and I’ve known many of them. There is no lower kind of individual on earth than a person who is sworn to serve but who deliberately aids a molester and condemns the victim to a lifetime of resentment and self-mortification.

  But my uncertainty would not go away.

  I called Levon at home. “I need a medical report from your physician,” I said. “You and Rowena have to give him permission to release it.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “It will tell us if there was bruising. Or any number of other things.”

  “Does that have to be public knowledge?” he asked.

  “We can’t make a case without it.”

  “Hasn’t she talked about it enough? I think there’s an element of voyeurism in this.”

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “What if there are only minor scratches and a small bruise? Dave, the real damage was done in ways I don’t want to describe.”

  “Y’all had better make up your minds.”

  “All right, I’ll call Dr. LeBlanc.”

  “Thank you.” I hung up without saying good-bye.

  I used a patrolwoman to call Nightingale’s home and find out where he was. I didn’t want him prepared for the interview; nor did I want him coming to the department with an attorney. The patrolwoman told the cousin or half sister, Emmeline Nightingale, that she wanted to contact Mr. Jimmy about a contribution to the Louisiana Police Benevolent Association, for which she actually solicited funds.

  I headed for his office in Morgan City. It was located not far from the big bridge that spanned the Atchafalaya River, with a view to the south of the shrimp boats at the docks and miles of emerald-green marshland and islands of gum and willow trees.

  Jimmy was reading the newspaper, with one leg propped across the corner of his desk, when the secretary escorted me into his inner office. He put aside his newspaper and grinned as though God were in His heaven and all was right with the world. “My favorite flatfoot.”

  I sat down. “I’m going to turn on my recorder. Okay?”

  “What for?”

  “Sometimes I can’t read my own handwriting.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Rowena Broussard dropped a heavy dime on you, Jimmy. Rape, assault and battery, sodomy, maybe false imprisonment.”

  “The heck you say.”

  “She says y’all had some drinks and ended up on your boat at Cypremort Point.”

  “That’s right. But that’s all there was to it.”

  “You didn’t attack her?”

  “Attack her? I didn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t have consensual sex?”

  “I showed her my boat. That woman is nuts, Dave. I was pretty plowed myself. She could have put my lights out.”

  “She’s pretty convincing.”

  “Send her out to Hollywood. She deserves an Academy Award. I can’t believe this.”

  I couldn’t, either, but for other reasons. In most rape cases, the accused immediately claims the act was done with consent. The issue then devolves into various claims about intoxication and the use of narcotics and muscle relaxants, or inability on the victim’s part to show sound judgment. I had never caught a sexual assault case involving adults in which the accused claimed to have done absolutely nothing.

  Jimmy put a mint into his mouth and looked at me, never blinking. If you have dealt with liars, even pathological ones who pass polygraph tests, you know the signs to look for. The liar blinks just before the end of the lie, or he keeps his eyelids stitched to his brow. He folds his arms on his chest, subconsciously concealing his deception. The voice becomes warm, a bit saccharine; sometimes there’s an ethereal glow in the face. He repeats his statements unnecessarily and peppers his speech with adverbs and hyperbole. The first-person pronouns “I,” “me,” “mine,” and “myself” dominate his rhetoric.

  Conversely, the truth teller is laconic and seems bored with the discussion, not caring whether you get it right or not.

  Nightingale showed none of the traditional characteristics of the liar, and I began to believe him. Then something very strange occurred. For just a second I saw a glimmer in the corner of his eye, like a wet spot. His throat became ruddy; his lips parted slightly, as though he wanted to confide a secret to a trusted friend.

  “Did you want to tell me something, Jimmy?”

  The moment passed. His eyes were bright, his smile in place. “I don’t know what I could add.”

  “Want to come in and make a formal statement with your attorney present?”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Do it by the book. Show everybody you have nothing to hide,” I replied.

  “Said the spider to the fly. Where is this going, Dave?”

  “That’s up to the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Rowena really said all those things?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I was a fool to take her to the boat. What’s Levon got to say about all this?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I was hoping to put a movie deal together with him. I’ve got the connections to do it. I guess that’s in the toilet, huh?”

  “You’re being accused of rape and sodomy, and you’re worried about a movie deal?”

  “I thought Levon and I could make a grand film. He’s a bit negative on Hollywood. I thought a down-home touch might be the key.”

  “A down-home touch?”

  “Outsiders don’t understand us. Why do we have to depend on Hollywood to make movies about us?”

  His presumption and naïveté would probably get him laughed out of Los Angeles or New York, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. “Thanks for your time, Jimmy. You’re not planning to take a trip anywhere, are you?”

  “No, I’m at your disposal. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  I thought about the beating death of T. J. Dartez. “I know the feeling.”

  * * *

  ALAFAIR PULLED IN to the driveway late that afternoon. As I looked at her, I had to wonder again at the arbitrary nature of fate and how the most influential events in our lives are usually unexpected and unplanned. On a clear day out at Southwest Pass, I had heard a sputtering sound just before the twin-engine plane came in low on the water, a long black column of smoke stringing behind it. The pilot was gunning the engines, probably trying to reach Pecan Island, where he could pancake in the salt grass. But he’d hit the water and flipped, and the waves had washed over the fuselage, and the plane had gone down in the murk like a deflating yellow balloon.

  I still have nightmares in which I swim down to the wreck, my air tank almost empty, while clouds of sand rise from the plane’s wings and the bat wings of stingrays flutter by me and a little girl struggles to find an air bubble inside the cabin. My second wife, Annie, and I took her to a hospital and named her Alafair for my mother and began raising her in the Cajun culture in which I had grown up. She forgot her own language and the death squad that attacked her village and became an honor student and went to Reed College. The next stop was number one in her class at Stanford Law.

  But as with all parents, when I looked at Alafair, I saw the child and not the adult, as though she were incapable of growing older. I had a footlocker in the attic where I kept her Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, her Orca the Whale T-shirt, her Donald Duck hat with the quacking bill that we bought at Disneyland, and her pink tennis shoes embossed with “Left” and “Right” on the appropriate toes.

  The leaves were floating from the trees and blowing on the street when
I went to greet her. She was tall and lithe and had long Indian-black hair and brown eyes and an IQ that wasn’t measurable. Only two people in one million have it.

  I carried her things into her bedroom, which I dusted and cleaned every week and kept closed and never let anyone use, not even Clete. After she put her things away, we went to the cemetery and placed flowers in a vase on Molly’s grave. I never talked about Molly’s death unless I had to, not even at the grave. I don’t believe that acceptance of mortality is a situation you resolve by talking with others. The same with personal grief and mourning or loss of any kind. I remember the words of a black ex-junkie musician friend of mine who got clean in a lockdown unit where he beat his head to pulp against a steel wall: “You deal wit’ your own snakes or you don’t, man. Sometimes you’re the only cat in the cathedral. Ain’t nobody else can do it for you.”

  When we got home, I knew Alafair had read my thoughts.

  “You bottle up your feelings, Dave,” she said. “I think that’s why you got drunk again.”

  “Give it a rest, Alf.”

  “You kept feeding your anger toward T. J. Dartez. What do they say at meetings? You get drunk at somebody?”

  “Something like that.”

  I started taking food out of the icebox. She had just gone to the heart of the matter. Every time I tried to remember what had happened after I’d seen the headlights in my rearview mirror, I reached the same conclusion, and it is the same conclusion every alcoholic reaches after he comes off a bender, sick and trembling and terrified: I had done something my conscious mind refused to accept.

  “I haven’t quite told you everything,” I said. “I went after a guy by the name of Kevin Penny. He’s a violent man and a three-time loser who was going to hurt his kid.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “It involved a swimming lesson in the toilet bowl.”

  Her eyes roved over my face. “What if he takes it out on his kid?”

  “I called social services. They’re going to make home calls, and so is Clete.”

  “Why do you have it in for this guy in particular?”

  “I don’t know. He bothers me. I came within a few seconds of drowning him. I wanted to do it.”

  I poured a glass of milk and drank it. She watched me silently. “He isn’t filing charges?” she asked.

  “I had a bandana on my face.”

  “Did somebody set you up on the Dartez deal?”

  “Evidently, I called his house the night he was killed. I asked him to meet me out by Bayou Benoit.”

  “That’s where he was killed?”

  “Yes,” I said. I showed her my hands. They were scabbed over, the knuckles still swollen.

  “Could you have punched a wall?”

  “That’s what I’d like to believe.”

  “Clete believes Fat Tony Nemo and Jimmy Nightingale and Levon Broussard may be mixed up in this,” she said.

  “Clete and I are always trying to find excuses for each other.”

  “He says you had dinner with Nightingale and Levon.”

  “Nightingale got ahold of a sword carried by Levon’s great-grandfather in the Civil War and gave it to him. Nightingale wants to make a movie from one of Levon’s novels. Except Levon’s wife and Nightingale hit it off a little too well.”

  “Nightingale thinks he’s going to produce a film with Levon? Where’s he been?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone knows Levon hates Hollywood. He thinks they screwed up a couple of his adaptations. On CNN he said Hollywood is a potential gold mine for anthropologists because it’s the only culture in the world where educated and rich and powerful people have the mind-set and manners of Southern white trash.”

  “That’s not a bad line.”

  I fixed avocado-and-tomato sandwiches for both of us and we sat down at the breakfast table by the window. I glanced through the screen. “Look yonder.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a coon on top of Tripod’s hutch.”

  She leaned forward and peered through the screen. “I don’t see him.”

  “He’s right there,” I said, pointing. “His tail is hanging down the side of the hutch.”

  “I guess I need glasses.”

  Since when? I wondered.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, I finally caught Levon Broussard’s physician in his office. His name was Melvin LeBlanc. He had been a navy corpsman during the first Iraqi war, and when he came home, he became a Quaker and enrolled in medical school at Tulane. He had the face of an ascetic, thinning, sandy hair, and a stare that gave you the sense that he saw presences others did not. We were sitting in his office with the door closed.

  “I’m not keen on this kind of stuff, Dave,” he said.

  “It’s too personal?”

  “I don’t like to be used. That’s what the defense does. That’s what you guys do.”

  “Rowena and Levon gave you carte blanche to tell us everything, didn’t they?” I said.

  “I can tell you what I found or didn’t find. But don’t try to put words in my mouth.”

  “Was there evidence of forced penetration?” I said.

  “Around the vagina, no. There was a bruise inside one thigh.”

  “A recent one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No abrasions?”

  “Abrasions where?”

  “Wherever they might be significant, Melvin.”

  “On the hip.”

  “Scratches?”

  “Correct.”

  “Perhaps consistent with someone tearing an undergarment from a victim’s person?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t use the word ‘victim,’ either,” he said.

  “Did you do any swabs?”

  “Ms. Broussard showered after she returned home. I recommended she go to the hospital and have a rape kit done. She refused.”

  “No trauma around the vagina?”

  “None other than the bruise on the thigh.”

  “How about inside?”

  “She didn’t indicate any discomfort.”

  “This isn’t coming together for me, Doc.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “Ms. Broussard says the assailant sodomized her.”

  “That’s a relative word,” he said.

  “Not in this case.”

  “If you’re asking about bite marks, there were none in the usual places.”

  “How about elsewhere?”

  “On the shoulder.”

  “A bite mark?”

  “What some call a hickey. It could have been put there before she went on the boat.”

  “Is that why you didn’t mention it when I asked about abrasions?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any other reason?” I asked.

  “There were only two people on that boat. One is lying, the other is not. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  “You think Rowena Broussard would deliberately put herself through this kind of embarrassment? Would any woman, at least one who’s sane?”

  “Hell hath no fury,” he said.

  “Not a good metaphor.”

  “On the frontier, it was called cabin fever. Levon has a helium balloon for a head. His art comes first. He even tells people that at book signings. Some people want to save the world but don’t have time for their own family.”

  “What are you saying, Doc?”

  “The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.”

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON, ALAFAIR was raking leaves in the backyard when she heard a vehicle come up the driveway and park under the porte cochere, as though the driver lived in the house. She walked around the side and saw a trim blond man get out of a red Honda that looked brand-new. He wore loafers and gray slacks and a long-sleeve purple shirt and a shiny black tie with a gold pin. His stomach was flat, his hair stiff with dressing of some kind, his hands
big, the knuckles pronounced. He was holding a clipboard. “Hi. I’m Detective Spade Labiche. I work with Dave.”

  “He’s not here right now,” she said.

  “Yeah, he caught the Broussard rape case, didn’t he? Did he see the doc yet?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me parking under your porte cochere. I had my car waxed.”

  “My car is parked on the street, so we don’t need the space right now,” she said.

  The implication seemed to elude him. “This is a nice spot,” he said. “He put you to work? The old man.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve read a couple of your books. I thought you’d be typing instead of piling leaves.”

  “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “I’m excluding Dave in the situation that took place out by Bayou Benoit.” His accent was bottom-of-the-bucket New Orleans.

  “Why would Dave be here during work hours?” she said.

  “He eats lunch at home some days, doesn’t he?”

  “It’s after two.”

  “I’ve never met a famous author. Where do you get your ideas?”

  “I’ve never given it much thought. Do you want to leave a message?”

  “Yeah, I could do it that way. You were an ADA in Portland, right? You know the ropes.”

  “The ropes?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. We’re all on the same side.” He looked away at the bayou, a little dreamy. He scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck and glanced at his fingertips. The day was warm. When the wind changed, his odor touched her face, a mixture of detergent and perspiration.

  “We couldn’t get any prints off the Dartez door handle,” he said. “Maybe somebody wiped them off, or maybe his body was dragged over the handle. I tweezered up some broken glass from the ground and inside the truck. The lab found Dave’s prints on a couple of them. I know there’s an explanation. I just need to get the explanation into my paperwork.” He looked down as he pulled his tie taut on his shirtfront and, at the same time, took her measure from her breasts to her thighs.

  “What’s your name again?” she asked.

  “Call me Spade.”