Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  It took her a second. “Why didn’t you say that?”

  “I’m not objective about certain individuals.”

  “Have you seen Labiche?”

  “In the coffee room.”

  “Tell him to get his ass in here.”

  * * *

  THAT EVENING I went to an A.A. meeting in Lafayette. Sometimes A.A. is a hard sell in South Louisiana. Booze is a big part of the culture. When I was a teenager, nobody was ever carded. Uniformed cops worked as bartenders and in gambling houses in St. Martinville, Lafayette, and Opelousas. The law in Louisiana was never intended to be enforced. Its purpose was to provide a vague guideline that made people feel respectable. New Iberia had the most notorious red-light district in the state. There was a semi-cathouse and bar right around the corner from the Lafayette Daily Advertiser in the middle of downtown. Friday was family night, no prostitutes allowed; the boiled crawfish and shrimp were free. What better way to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?

  Drive-through daiquiri windows are open until two A.M. You can get plowed before you go to midnight Mass. Fans get wildly drunk at baseball games. If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.

  The meetings I attend are made up of the bravest people I’ve ever known. Don’t let anyone tell you that only victims of war suffer post-traumatic problems. The unconscious of a recovering drunk is filled with images no one wants to have as part of his spiritual cache. They hit you at a red light, shopping in a grocery, talking to a friend, kneeling in church. There are people in A.A. who have killed people with their cars or their bare hands. There are people whose negligence killed their children.

  As I sat in the meeting in Lafayette, I felt dishonest and unworthy. I had owned up to my slip but not to the possibility that I was involved in a homicide. Nor had I told anyone that the desire to drink was still with me, that pushing a basket down the beer and wine aisle at Winn-Dixie made my throat go dry. A Lutheran minister sat on one side of me, a black hooker on the other. The woman leading the meeting owned a chain of hair salons. Our commonality lay in our addictions and unexplainable chemistry, one that absolutely no one, including us, understands.

  Though I don’t believe in capital punishment, I don’t mourn when someone like Penny gets blown out of his socks. However, no one deserves to go out the way he did. When it was my time to speak, I told the group that I was a police officer and had seen an awful instance of inhumanity that morning. I added that, when drunk and in a blackout, I may have been guilty of inhumane acts myself. After the Our Father, the hooker told me to have a nice evening, the minister asked if I could give his car battery a jump, and the woman who owned the beauty salons stopped washing coffee cups long enough to throw me a dish towel.

  As sober drunks say, there are no big deals in A.A.

  * * *

  EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, while I was shaving and Alafair was on her jog, someone twisted the bell on the gallery. I walked into the living room and looked through the window screen. Spade Labiche stood four feet away, staring at a squirrel on the lawn. I resumed shaving. Two minutes later, he was at the back door.

  “What do you want, partner?” I said.

  “To get something straight.”

  “See you in my office.”

  “I know we’re not on the best of terms. But I’m going to tell you what I told Helen. You can look at the sign-out sheet. I went to interview Penny. I lost my lighter somewhere. It must have been at his trailer.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “I got a call from this broad in Jennings. She ran my prints. She wants to interview me.”

  “Sherry Picard?”

  “Yeah, that’s her name. She sounds like a real cunt.”

  “You delivered your message, Spade.”

  “Can’t we be friends, shake hands or something? I shoot off my mouth sometimes.”

  “No problem. I’ll see you later.”

  “Okay. You got it,” he said.

  I watched him walk away, obviously confident that he had righted the universe. I wondered how much time would pass before he tried to give it to me between the shoulder blades.

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON I was just leaving my office when Sherry Picard came up the stairs and walked toward me. Her badge holder and a small holstered revolver were hooked on her belt; a pair of cuffs was pulled through the back. Two deputies at the water cooler couldn’t take their eyes off her.

  “Got a minute?” she said to me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Behind her, one of the deputies pretended to draw two pistols and fire at either me or her. I let her walk ahead of me into my office. I closed the door.

  “Tell the two needle dicks at the cooler that I heard their comments,” she said.

  “Report them to Sheriff Soileau. She doesn’t put up with that kind of thing.”

  “There’re no helpful prints inside the trailer,” she said.

  “How about on the fast-food trash you picked up by the shed?”

  “They’re not in the system.”

  “What did you get off the drill?”

  “The latents aren’t in the system.”

  I twiddled a ballpoint on my desk pad. “Why are you here, Detective?”

  “The social worker, Carolyn Ardoin, she and Purcel are an item, right?”

  “Anybody who knows Clete will tell you he’s not capable of doing something like this. I won’t even discuss it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I’m not his keeper.”

  “That’s a joke.”

  She was sitting in front of my desk. She wore starched, Cloroxed jeans and a white snap-button western shirt. Her hair was thick and had the same purplish-black sheen in it as Alafair’s. “I’ve seen Purcel’s sheet. He has a way of settling scores on his own.”

  This time I grinned and said nothing.

  She looked away, her frustration obvious. I suspected she didn’t get a lot of support from her peers in Jennings.

  “I’d start with Fat Tony Nemo and a couple of guys named Maximo Soza and JuJu Ladrine,” I said.

  “With respect, you don’t know shit about this case, Detective Robicheaux. Kevin Penny was a confidential informant for the FBI.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “An agent told me. Penny set up his wife’s brother. The brother hanged himself in his cell. The agent told me Penny couldn’t have cared less.”

  “So maybe Tony Nemo is your guy.”

  “I knew Tony when I was with the St. Bernard Sheriff’s Department. He’s not stupid enough to torture and kill a federal CI.”

  “What else can I tell you?” I said.

  “Evidently, you worked a couple of the Jeff Davis Eight cases,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You just shut the drawer on them?”

  “Nobody shuts the drawer on a corpse, particularly a young girl’s.”

  “What a laugh.”

  She got up to go. The two deputies who had made comments about her walked past the door glass. She dropped her business card onto the chair. “I think you’re in the right place.”

  * * *

  RATHER THAN TAKE overtime pay, I took Wednesday off and went fishing in my boat just north of Marsh Island. The wind was up, and a hard chop was slapping the hull, and few boats were out. I didn’t mind being alone. Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death. I put the statement in the third person for a reason. I don’t believe I ever achieved these things with any appreciable degree of success. But there are moments when we understand that the earth and the sky and the presences that may lie behind them are always with us.

  The coastline was a heartbreaking green inside the mist. Flying fish broke from the bay’s surfac
e and sailed above the water like pink-gilded, winged creatures, in defiance of evolutionary probability. The salt spray breaking on my bow was cold and fresh and smelled of resilience and the mysterious powers the earth contains. My boat seemed to float on a cushion of air rising from the same primeval soup that gave birth to the first living creatures.

  I saw a burnt-orange pontoon plane come in low out of a pale yellow sun, the pilot seated in an open cockpit. The plane swooped by, then circled and set down in the chop, blowing water in a huge cloud. The pilot cut the prop and let his plane drift toward me. He pulled up his goggles with his thumb, smearing grease below his eye, like the World War I aviator he obviously wanted to be. He threw me a rope. “Hope I didn’t chase off your catch,” Jimmy Nightingale said.

  “Lose your way home?” I said.

  “Sheriff Soileau told me where you’d be. Can I come aboard?” He jumped onto the bow without waiting for me to answer. “This is the life. You got any coffee or sandwiches?” I pointed to my cooler. He pulled off the lid. “Man, I love fried chicken,” he said.

  “Fang it down.”

  He sat on a cushion behind the console and bit into a drumstick. “I’m out here to make a confession.”

  “I watched you pitch a number of times, Jimmy. You had a nasty habit.”

  “Like what?”

  “Spitting on baseballs.”

  “Think I’d throw you a slider?”

  I didn’t answer. He began talking about marlin fishing, Washington politics, benchmark oil prices, everything except what was on his mind. Then he said, “Maybe I did get it on with her. But it was consensual. I had more to drink than I was willing to admit. We were both out of it. I also happened to have a bowl of Afghan skunk on hand. She probably didn’t tell you about that.”

  “You’re talking about you and Rowena Broussard?”

  “Who else?”

  “We’ve gone from denial of rape, to denial of any physical contact at all, to consensual. It’s hard to keep up with you, Jimmy.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “You confess but you don’t confess.”

  “You’re right. That’s not what’s on my mind.” He stared at the water, the tide slapping against the hull. “You saw some bad things in Vietnam?”

  “Can’t remember. It’s odd.”

  “Be honest.”

  “Nope. I’m a total blank on it,” I said.

  “I did something I’d like to stick in an envelope and mail to Mars.”

  I didn’t want to be the repository for all the evil in the world. Like Clete, I had too many videos of my own. They may not have been of my making, but nonetheless I had to carry them. I was determined not to add Jimmy Nightingale’s burden to my own.

  “Take your bullshit somewhere else,” I said.

  He tossed a chicken bone over his shoulder into the water and wiped his hands on his trousers. “You’re going to hear it whether you like it or not. It was in South America. We were drilling in jungle that was so thick the wind couldn’t blow through it. The temperature was one hundred degrees at ten P.M. and the humidity ninety percent. We all felt like we had ants crawling inside our clothes.

  “The Indians claimed the land was theirs and hung bones in the trees as a warning. When that didn’t work, they started shooting arrows at us. We built a wooden shell around the derrick. It turned into an oven, maybe one hundred twenty degrees. The floor men were fainting or puking in a bucket. We poured water on everybody every half hour. One guy got hit with the tongs. Then a kid took a blow dart in the neck. It had poison on it.”

  “I know where you’re going,” I said, raising my hand. “Don’t say any more.”

  He ignored me. “The crew was going to quit. The alternative was to bring in the army. That meant we’d have them on the payroll. For all I knew, it was the army who stirred up the Indians. What was I supposed to do? Everything was coming apart. There was no reasoning with the Indians. They filed their teeth and mutilated their bodies. The head greaseball said they killed their own children. I had to do something. My father said a leader has to take charge. ‘You save lives when you take charge.’ That’s what he always said.”

  Jimmy paused in the way people do when they want you to agree with them. I stared at the incoming tide, the orange pontoon plane rocking in the chop, baitfish skittering across the surface as they tried to evade a predator below.

  “I got ahold of some satchel charges,” he said. “They were old, maybe Korean War–issue. I didn’t know if they’d detonate. I was twenty-two years old. Another geologist and I flew over the Indians’ village. He took the stick, and I pulled the cord on the satchels and threw them out the window. I thought maybe they’d land in the trees and scare the hell out of everybody. I mean, the plane was banking, I wasn’t thinking clearly, that’s all I wanted to do, scare them. That’s what I was thinking when I got in the plane. Just scare them. I told that to the other geologist. That kid they shot with the blow dart almost died, for Christ’s sake.”

  I reeled in my line and laid my rod across the gunwale. Just off Marsh Island, a sailboat was tacking hard in the wind, waves bursting on the prow. My father used to trap on Marsh Island. He was killed in a blowout on a derrick. Sometimes I would see him standing in the surf, giving me the thumbs-up sign, his hard hat cocked on his forehead.

  “You’re not going to say anything?” Jimmy asked.

  “No.”

  “What, you think I’m geology’s answer to Charlie Manson?”

  “No.”

  “Get off it, Dave. What are you trying to do to me?”

  “What happened to the Indians?”

  “The army went in and cleaned it up.”

  “Cleaned it up?”

  “Took care of the injured or whatever.”

  “Did you go to the village?”

  “I had a deadline. We were down eight thousand feet. We should have hit a pay sand at five thousand. Our investors were shitting their pants.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “The village was on fire. You could see it glowing all night. In the morning there was a black column of smoke across the jungle for two miles. It smelled like garbage burning. Any white person who went down there would have been killed or tied to a tree, and had the skin stripped off him.”

  I unscrewed my thermos and filled the cap with café au lait and drank from it. “I’m sorry I don’t have another cup. There’re some cold drinks in the ice.”

  “A cold drink? Where’s your soul?”

  “You’ve made your statement, Jimmy. My advice is to get rid of the past and get on the square.”

  “I am on the square. That’s why I’m running for Senate. I want to do good things for other people. There’re people who say I can be president. Look at Clinton and Obama. They came out of nowhere.”

  “You’re in with Bobby Earl,” I said. “When he’s no longer useful, you’ll throw him out with the coffee grounds. Here’s a reminder for you. Mussolini was hanged upside down in a filling station by the same people who elected him.”

  “I’m going to be a dictator?”

  I shifted my position on the cushion and flung my line, baited with shrimp, in a high arc over the water. I kept my back to Jimmy Nightingale until I felt the boat wobble as he stepped onto his plane. Then I pulled my anchor and started my twin outboards and headed toward home, eager to see Alafair and Clete and all the others who represent what is good in the human race.

  * * *

  IN MY OPINION, one of the great follies in the world is to put yourself inside the head of dysfunctional people. The mistake we usually make is to assume there is a rationale for their behavior. In most cases, there is none. Long ago, I came to regard the Mob in New Orleans as I would an infected gland. Most of them had the technical skill of hod carriers. They were brutal, stupid to the core, and had the visceral instincts of medieval peasants armed with pitchforks. Their sexual appetites were a hooker’s nightmare. The portrayal of them as family men was a j
oke. They preyed on the weak, corrupted unions, appropriated mom-and-pop stores, and created object lessons with chain saws and meat hooks. The reinvention of this bunch as Elizabethan men of honor probably would have made Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe sick.

  Tony Nine Ball not only came to New Iberia, his chauffeured Chrysler caught up with Alafair on the paved running track in City Park. He rolled down his tinted window. “How you do, Miss Alafair? I’m Tony Nemo, an associate of your father’s.”

  She thought she was looking at a malignant octopod stuffed into a tailored suit. She sped up and passed the picnic tables and swing sets under the live oaks and circled by the baseball diamond while the Chrysler paced her.

  “I just want to explain something,” Tony said out the window. “I got the backing for the picture. But I got to tie it down. Hey! How about listening, here? You deaf?”

  She stopped and breathed slowly. “Say it.”

  “Get in. I got coffee, I got beignets, I got cinnamon rolls. I got some chocolates, too.”

  She had done three miles. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and tried to catch her breath. “Last chance, Mr. Nemo.”

  “I got to get out of the car. I can’t bend over and talk like this. It pinches off my pipes.” His driver helped him out, then walked him to a picnic table. Tony collapsed on the bench, wheezing. “These guys in Hollywood say I got to get the option. It ain’t enough to use a historical story. Levon Broussard told me to get lost, that a local person is already doing the treatment. So who’s that local person gotta be?”

  “I don’t have control of the option, Mr. Nemo. I was doing an outline for fun.”

  “Nobody does anything for nothing in the film business. Look, come in with me on this deal. I checked you out. You’re already in the Screenwriters Guild. The state of Louisiana pays up to twenty-five percent in tax exemptions and subsidies for films that get made here. We put some locals in Confederate uniforms and hire a boxcar load of boons, and we’re in business.” When she didn’t answer, he looked her up and down. “I’m not supposed to say ‘boons.’ They call each other niggers.”

  “The answer is no.”

  “Union minimum for a treatment is, what, twenty-two grand? That’s for ten pages. I’ll write you a check now.”