Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  I have a daughter who needs me.

  We all get to the same place. She’ll be joining us one day as well.

  You wouldn’t talk like that if you had a daughter.

  I had a son, though. The blue-belly who put a ball through my heart didn’t care about him or me.

  If God had a daughter, I bet He wouldn’t have let her die on a cross.

  Then perhaps you belong among the quick. Right you are, sir. Top of the evening to you.

  The column disappeared inside the fog. I felt a weight bounce sharply on my lap and tumble off my knees. I thought I had wakened, then realized I was still dreaming, because I saw a raccoon waddling through the leaves, his furry tail flicking like a fat spring. I fell deeper into my sleep, into a place that was cool and warm at the same time, when the year was 1945 and people in my community spoke only French and on festival days danced under the stars with the innocence of medieval folk.

  Someone shook my arm, hard and steady. “Wake up, Dave.”

  I looked up at Alafair’s face.

  “Better come in before you get rained on,” she said.

  I stood up, off balance. “What a dream.”

  “You were laughing.”

  “I thought a big coon jumped in my lap.”

  “Better take a look at your trousers.”

  The muddy paw prints were unmistakable. There was a gummy smear on one thigh. I touched it and smelled my fingers.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Sardines.”

  “Maybe he got in somebody’s trash.”

  “Coons don’t jump in people’s laps.”

  “Tripod did,” she said.

  “He sure did. How you doin’, Alfenheimer?”

  “Why are you acting so weird?”

  “I’ll take weird over rational any day of the week,” I said.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, I went to the office of the Broussard family physician, Melvin LeBlanc. “Now what?” he said.

  “Rowena cut her wrists right above the palms,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “If you’re serious about going off-planet, you do it higher up, don’t you?”

  “People are not in a rational state when they try to take their lives,” he replied.

  “Am I right or not, Doc?”

  “They do it here.” He drew two fingers high up on his inner forearm. He gazed innocuously out the window.

  “Is there something else you want to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Let me rephrase. Is there something else you feel I should know?”

  “I’d like to have you banned from my office. How about that?”

  I held his eyes.

  “Rowena had medical training in Australia,” he said. “She nursed Indians in South America. What we used to call meatball medicine.”

  “She wasn’t serious about getting to the barn?”

  “This doesn’t mean she wasn’t assaulted.”

  “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  THAT NIGHT, ALAFAIR played tennis with friends at Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette. The night was black, the lights over the courts iridescent with humidity, the whocking sounds of tennis balls and the huffing and shouts of the players a celebration of spring and rebirth. When Alafair’s friends quit for the evening, she wiped herself off with a towel and began hitting on the backboard. A woman in a pleated tennis skirt and a white sweater cut off at the armpits, with black hair pulled back as tightly as wire, walked up behind her, spinning the shaft of a racquet in her left palm. “Like to have another go at it?”

  “Pardon?” Alafair said.

  “You’re Alafair Robicheaux. I recognized you from the photo on your book jacket.”

  “Yes,” Alafair said.

  “I’m Emmeline Nightingale.”

  “Are you—”

  “Jimmy Nightingale’s cousin and bookkeeper. My partner didn’t show. I was hoping to hit a few.”

  “I was about to head back to New Iberia.”

  “Maybe another time, then. Your last book was marvelous.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I read you graduated at the top of Stanford Law. Look, I didn’t mean to do anything inappropriate. I know who your father is, and I know he’s talking to Jimmy about some legal matters.”

  “No, that has nothing to do with my situation,” Alafair said.

  “Well, anyway, I wanted to introduce myself and tell you how much I admire your writing. Damn it, I wanted to play tonight.”

  “If you like, we can volley a bit.”

  Emmeline went to the far end of a nearby court and began dancing on the balls of her feet. Alafair went to the baseline and bounced the ball once, then hit it leisurely across the net. Emmeline returned it in the same way, smiling, showing no sense of competitiveness, making sure the return always went to Alafair’s forehand. Then, for no apparent reason, she swung the racquet hard, rolling it with her wrist and top-speeding the ball so it scotched the surface of the court and flew past Alafair’s reach.

  “Good shot,” Alafair said, ignoring the breach of protocol.

  “Sorry, I was still thinking about my partner not showing up,” Emmeline said.

  They stroked the ball back and forth, then Alafair hit to Emmeline’s left side and advanced on the net, intending to create a routine pepper game. Emmeline returned the ball with a two-arm backhand that slashed the ball like a BB into Alafair’s face.

  Alafair lowered her racquet and pressed her wrist to her mouth. Emmeline ran to the net. “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

  “I’m fine,” Alafair replied. “You didn’t know I was coming to the net. It’s my fault.”

  “Here, let me see,” Emmeline said. “Your lip is cut. Let’s go inside. I’ll get some ice.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Let’s have a cold drink. Please. I feel awful.”

  “Really, I’m okay.”

  “Please,” Emmeline said.

  Alafair slipped the cover onto her racquet and zipped it up. She looked at her automobile in the lot. Emmeline touched a Kleenex to Alafair’s chin and showed it to her. “Come on, we have to take care of that.”

  * * *

  AFTER ALAFAIR WENT to the restroom, she joined Emmeline in the health bar. Emmeline ordered iced fruit drinks for them and put the charge on her bill. “I took a chance: You like strawberries and pineapple, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “The ice will stop the swelling. Go ahead. Drink.”

  Alafair looked at Emmeline’s reflection in the mirror. The woman’s face was flushed, her breath short, as though from exertion or excitement.

  “You seem a little tense,” Alafair said.

  “I have a confession to make.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I recognized you not only from your photo but from the university library. You were asking the reference librarian about Civil War maps and the Union occupation of southwestern Louisiana. You told her you were writing a screenplay.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Can I ask about what?”

  “Reconstruction and the White League and a Confederate veteran who teaches a former slave girl to read and write.”

  “What’s the White League?”

  “The Klan were amateurs in comparison. The White League took over New Orleans in 1872 and shot James Longstreet.”

  “You know what the story sounds like?”

  Alafair didn’t answer.

  “Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel based on his ancestors.”

  “Could be,” Alafair said.

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “In Hollywood, historical stories are called period pieces; they’re toxic. Think Cold Mountain. I’m doing what’s called a treatment. It’s a lark more than anything.”

  “I think Levon Broussard’s novel is a great book. The first movies were westerns, weren’t they? At some point movies w
ill have to go back to their origins, won’t they?”

  Alafair pushed her drink back toward the edge of the bar. She touched her lip. “I think I’ve stopped bleeding.”

  “Do you have a formal situation with Levon?”

  “Maybe you should ask him.”

  “I would except for that Australian bitch he calls a wife.”

  Alafair looked at her watch. “I’d better be going.”

  Emmeline moved her hand on top of Alafair’s. “ ‘Bitch’ is kind. She’s trying to ruin my cousin’s life.”

  “I’ll be leaving now, Miss Emmeline.”

  Emmeline worked her fingers around Alafair’s hand. Her skin felt moist and hot, her fingers squeezing like tentacles. “Hear me out. Regardless of what people say, Jimmy has a tender conscience. He worries over things other people wouldn’t give a second thought about. You ever hang around the CEOs in the oil business? They let others do their dirty work.”

  “I’m not sure what we’re talking about. Please release my hand.”

  “Sorry. Meet this collection of shits and tell me how you like it. You have no idea what they do in the third world.”

  Alafair couldn’t track the sequence. She got off the stool. “Dave worries about me.”

  “Then call him.”

  “Be seeing you around, I’m sure.”

  Emmeline’s eyes seem to take Alafair’s inventory. “Top of your class at Stanford Law. That’s impressive. But somebody has to do it, right?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Alafair went out the glass doors and didn’t look back; she felt a rivulet of blood running from one nostril. When she started her car, her heart was thudding in her ears, as though evil could insinuate its way into a person’s life without consent.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, I received a call from the coroner, Cormac Watts.

  “What’s with your colleague?” he said.

  “Which colleague?”

  “Spade Labiche.”

  I looked through the glass on my office door. As coincidence would have it, Labiche was passing by. He cocked his thumb and index finger like a pistol and aimed it at me, winking.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “I called him twice and left messages he didn’t bother to answer. I had additional information to give him on the T. J. Dartez autopsy. Maybe it’s insignificant, maybe not.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “I know there’s a bull’s-eye painted on your back, Dave. I wanted to get all the information right, including the possibility that Dartez was a bad guy and responsible for your wife’s death, even though that’s not my job.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “The bloodwork showed he was legally drunk when he expired. His wife said he was an epileptic and took anti-seizure medication and wasn’t supposed to drink, but he drank anyway, and a lot. She also said he knocked her around. Anyway, I wanted to pass on the info, but the department’s affirmative-action homophobe doesn’t seem interested.”

  “You left this on his machine?”

  “Enough so he would know it’s important.”

  “I’ll get back with you shortly,” I said.

  I hung up and went into Labiche’s office. The message light on his phone was blinking. “Got any problem talking with Cormac Watts?” I asked.

  “Not as long as he stays off our toilet seats,” he replied.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “How does what feel?”

  “Being you. A full-time shithead.”

  “You’re way out of line, Robicheaux.”

  “Try this: You’re ignoring forensic evidence in a homicide investigation. You’re queering the prosecution’s case before it ever hits the prosecutor’s desk.”

  “Queering?”

  “It’s the old term for screwing up or delegitimizing.”

  “I’ve got to remember that. You’re a mountain of information, Robo.”

  “I’m going to give you five minutes to haul your sorry ass into Helen’s office and tell her what you’ve got.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I walked to his desk and picked up the receiver from his phone. I thunked it into the middle of his forehead and replaced it in the cradle. His cheeks drained; a pink half-moon pulsed under his hairline. “Five minutes,” I said.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT I tried to reach into the blackout where I had disappeared from the world of normal people. Experience had taught me that chemically induced amnesia has no cure. Your memory does not return at a convenient time; you do not walk from an airless black cell in Alcatraz’s infamous D block into sunlight and rationality. In all probability, you have permanently destroyed thousands of brain cells, just as though you had struck yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer. But sometimes the problem is psychological rather than neurological. If so, there is a way you can unspool the nightmare that your conscious mind might not want to accept. Unfortunately, the method is imperfect and dangerous. You can become convinced you have committed horrific acts when in fact you have not.

  Your ordinary dreams can contain bits and pieces of a larger event, in my case, an encounter with T. J. Dartez on a narrow two-lane parish road out by Bayou Benoit. The process is like reassembling a sheet of gray and black stained glass fallen from a church window to a flagstone floor. For me, that meant images flashing like a kaleidoscope deep down inside my sleep—the glare of headlights in my rearview mirror, a vehicle gnashing against my bumper, fences and weeds whirling around me, the leering face of an unshaved man with greasy black hair and nails rimmed with dirt, his eyes lit by the fires of stupidity and ignorance and rage.

  In none of my dreams, however, was I striking a man with my fists or choking or stomping and kicking him. How could I have killed a man with my bare hands, or with a club, and not have any trace of the crime in my unconscious? I wanted to believe I had set myself free. But I didn’t. Another image remained with me, one that had nothing to do with the event by Bayou Benoit. Instead, I saw him behind the wheel of his truck, his tires squealing around the curve that led to the intersection Molly was entering, his face dilated and drunk with the power the pedal transferred up his leg and into his genitals. I wanted to kill him even worse than I had wanted to kill Mack, the man who helped destroy my family. I wanted to break his bones and destroy his face with my fists. I wanted to do other things I will not describe. I harbored emotions that no Christian should ever have. But they were mine. I owned them. And they still lived within me, even though T. J. Dartez was lying on a slab, as cold and bloodless as stale lunch meat.

  Was I capable of the homicide out by Bayou Benoit? You tell me.

  SATURDAY MORNING, I put out another can of sardines for our raccoon friend, whom I named Mon Tee Coon. I had not heard Alafair come in from Red’s health club the night before. She walked up behind me, a mug of coffee in her hand. She was wearing white shorts and a long-sleeve denim shirt with the tails hanging out. She told me about her encounter with Emmeline Nightingale. “She’s a little otherworldly.”

  “A human icicle?” I said.

  “She has dirty eyes.”

  “You think she hit the ball in your face deliberately?”

  “That’s what I felt like after I talked with her. She’s a controller. She also seems to have an obsession with oil companies. What’s the story on that?”

  “Jimmy has a degree in geology. He worked in South America awhile. The Nightingales have their fingers in lots of pies.”

  She sat down in a white-painted wooden chair near Tripod’s hutch. The sky was blue and as shiny as silk. Leaves from the live oaks were tumbling on her hair and skin. I couldn’t believe she was the little girl I’d pulled from the cabin of a submerged plane.

  “She left me with a disturbing sensation,” Alafair said. “One I couldn’t shake driving home.”

  “Like what?”

  “Evil.”

  “You think she’s going to call you?”

/>   “Probably. She seems interested in the treatment I’m doing on Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel.”

  “Maybe that’s a project you should drop, Alf.”

  “Because of her?”

  “Because it’s going to drag you into contact with Levon and his wife. I think Rowena Broussard is a sick person.”

  “You don’t believe she was raped?”

  “She’s an unhappy person who has a tendency to work out her problems on the backs of other people.”

  “That’s two thirds of Hollywood,” she said.

  “Did you talk to Levon about the treatment?”

  “On the phone. He said it was fine with him, but he thought it was a waste of time.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s really good. The battle scenes at Shiloh, the Yankee occupation, the story of the slave girl and her white father who founded Angola Prison.”

  “Why hasn’t someone adapted it?”

  “Confederates are the new Nazis. Have you seen the raccoon again?”

  “Not yet. He’ll be back,” I said.

  “Are you okay, Dave?”

  “You bet.”

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Don’t use that kind of language, Alf.”

  She put down her coffee mug and stood up and hugged me and pressed her face into my shoulder. I felt the wetness in her eyes.

  “What’s this about?” I said.

  She wiped her eyes on my shirt.

  “Answer me, Alafair.”

  “I hate what they’re doing to you,” she said. “I’d like to shoot every motherfucking one of them.”

  “Don’t use that language in our home.”

  She hit me, again and again, her fists bouncing on my chest.

  * * *

  THE SOCIAL WORKER in Jennings was named Carolyn Ardoin. She was a matronly white-haired woman with lovely skin and a blush on her cheeks and soft hands. When Clete’s cell phone woke him up at 8:05 on Monday morning, he was surprised by how happy he felt to receive her call. He had met her only once, in her office, to talk about Kevin Penny’s eleven-year-old boy. Their conversation had been all business, with little time to speak of anything other than the child’s safety. But her perfume and her manner and the freshness of her clothes lingered with him.