Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  Back to weaponry and ballistics. No shell casing had been found. Unless the shooter picked up his brass, the weapon was a revolver. The fatal round had exited the back of McVane’s head and had to be somewhere. It was not inside the blood and brain matter on the grass, which meant it may not have fragmented.

  I went from tree trunk to tree trunk, running my hands over the bark. I looked down the slope. The Teche was a tidal stream that swelled up on the banks each day and receded with the influences of the moon. The surface was yellow and swollen and churning with mud and leaves and tree branches scattered by the same high winds that had swept through the area earlier in the day. A rowboat was tied to a cypress root a few feet down the bank. On the far side of the bayou was a weathered boathouse with a sagging dock. I got into the boat and rowed across.

  Sometimes you get lucky. A bullet was lodged in the door. I opened my pocketknife and eased it out of the wood. The nose was flattened, the sides morphed out of shape, like a piece of bent licorice. The striations were intact. I wrapped the bullet in a handkerchief and wadded up the handkerchief and put it into my pocket, then rowed back across the bayou.

  I called Helen and told her what I had found.

  “Take it to the lab,” she said.

  “Want me to check in with the locals?”

  “In St. Mary Parish?” she said.

  “I may make a stop before I head back.”

  “Stop where?”

  “Maybe the shooter was on an errand and McVane messed up his plan.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Jimmy Nightingale’s place is just down the road. Maybe he was a target.”

  “Why?”

  “Jimmy’s predecessors are Huey Long and George Wallace. I think he’ll come to the same end.”

  “It’s your case. Talk to you later,” she said.

  * * *

  EVEN AFTER JIMMY had told me about the bombing of the Indian village, I did not want to believe he was an evil man. Even though I had concluded in my report that he’d attacked Rowena Broussard, I believed his mind had been addled by booze and hash and driven more by desire than by sadistic intent. Why did I not want to believe these things? Like most of us who subscribe to the egalitarian traditions of Jefferson and Lincoln, I did not want to believe that a basically likable man could, with indifference and without provocation, commit deeds that were not only wicked but destroyed the lives of defenseless people. I also reminded myself that Jimmy was haunted by guilt, which is not the trademark of the unredeemable.

  As I pulled up to the Nightingale mansion on the bayou, I did not realize I was about to see a drama that could have come from the stage of the Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames. I heard shouting on the patio and walked around the side of the house and saw Bobby Earl and Emmeline Nightingale four feet apart, red-faced and hurling invective at each other. Down the slope, Jimmy was calmly whocking golf balls high into the sky, watching them drop into the bayou. His chauffeur, the peroxided one with the steroid-puffed physique and caved-in face, stood by his side, waiting to put a fresh tee and ball on the grass. None of them saw me.

  Earl’s face was trembling. “He denounced me on national television. Do you know what this has done to me? I went to prison for our cause.”

  “You went to prison for tax evasion,” Emmeline said.

  “I gave him my constituency.”

  “You don’t have one. Now get off our property.”

  “You’re a poisonous creature, Emmeline. The Great Whore of Babylon in the making.”

  “And you’re a self-important public fool. Good God, I don’t know how Jimmy stands you.”

  “Hello?” I said.

  They both looked at me as though awakening from a dream.

  “What do you want, Mr. Robicheaux?” Emmeline asked.

  “A word with you and Jimmy,” I said. “Bobby doesn’t need to hang around.”

  Earl’s face was full of hurt, like a child’s. This was the same man who had inflamed the passions of the great unwashed, then disavowed their actions when they burned and bombed and lynched. But I realized that, instead of the devil, I was looking at a moth batting its wings around a light that had grown cold.

  He had a pot stomach, like a balloon filled with water; his face was lined, his eyes tired. There was a pout on his mouth. “You remember that time you hit me?”

  “I do,” I replied.

  “It was a sucker punch. I had no chance to defend myself.”

  “You asked for it, and you were looking me straight in the face.”

  His eyes were wet. “The Nightingales wouldn’t let you clean their bathroom, Dave.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “And don’t call me Dave.”

  Jimmy walked up the slope, his golf club propped on his shoulder. “I must have missed out on quite a discussion.”

  “I told Bobby to leave,” Emmeline said.

  “Better do as she says, Bobby,” Jimmy said. “She’s tough.”

  “You’ve betrayed me,” Earl said.

  “Two paths diverged in a woods,” Jimmy said. “You should have followed mine, not yours.”

  “A pox on both y’all,” Earl said.

  “Work on your accent,” Emmeline said. “Everyone knows you’re from Kansas.”

  Earl’s face seemed to dissolve. He walked away, trying to hold himself erect. When he got into his car, he looked back at the patio. By then Emmeline was removing a pitcher of iced tea and the glasses from the table, and Jimmy was wiping off the mahogany head of his club with a rag. I had the feeling that if there is an invisible hell people carry with them, Earl had found it.

  “What puts you at our door, Dave?” Jimmy said.

  “A cop was shot and killed not far from your home. We don’t know why. Nor do we have anything on the shooter.”

  “And?”

  “You’re a famous man,” I said.

  “I heard the cop didn’t have a big fan club.”

  “The people he abused are not the kind who smoke cops.”

  “I don’t think this fellow’s demise has anything to do with me. Want to hit some balls?”

  “Listen to him, Jimmy,” Emmeline said.

  “This is how I feel about death,” he said. “I’ve had a good life. If a stranger walks up to me and parks one in my brain, I’ll thank him for waiting as long as he did.”

  “The cop’s name was McVane,” I said. “Did you know him?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought maybe he took a bullet for you. But who knows? Maybe the guy was trafficking. Or maybe an ex-lover got him. You never know.”

  “There are people out there who want to hurt Jimmy, but not because he’s running for office,” Emmeline said. “That gangster in New Orleans is actually putting together an adaptation of Levon Broussard’s work.”

  “Tony Nemo?”

  “Yes, the same obscene pile you people could never put in jail,” she said. “Jimmy had everything ready to go, then you went along with Rowena Broussard’s lies and destroyed Jimmy’s chances of producing the film. When this is over, I’m going to personally sue you into oblivion.”

  “Thank you for telling me that,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m mortgaged up to my eyes and not worth suing.”

  I saw Jimmy laugh silently behind her back.

  “What, you think that’s funny?” she said to me.

  “No,” I said, barely able to stifle a grin.

  I hated to admit Jimmy Nightingale still had a hold on me. I guess that’s just the way it was, growing up in a place like Louisiana, where pagan deities sometimes hide among us and we secretly champion rogues who get even for the rest of us.

  * * *

  THE ROUND WAS a .357 Magnum. We got a priority in processing at the National Crime Information Center because the round had been recovered from a homicide scene. The weapon that had probably killed McVane was an electronic match with six other bullets fired from the same weapon over a seven-year peri
od, most recently in Algiers, where two black men were shot to death in the kitchen of a rented house full of crack paraphernalia.

  I spent the next three days talking to cops in Orleans Parish, Tampa, Key West, Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Other than the two crack dealers, the victims were a retired button man from Yonkers, a bartender who shilled for a craps game, a serial pedophile, and a shylock. The obvious common denominator in the victims was criminality. But if these were Mob-connected hits, the usual pattern wasn’t there. Button men (so known because they pushed the “off” button on their victims) didn’t use the same weapon repeatedly. They also favored a smaller-caliber handgun, because the bullet slowed more quickly and bounced around inside the brain pan. Their classic execution featured one round through the forehead, one in the mouth, and one in the ear. Our shooter seemed spontaneous and left wounds all over the map. He had a way of painting the walls in public, too, without anyone ever getting a good description of him.

  For example: He walked into a clam house in Brooklyn and fired point-blank into the face of an infamous gangster who was having a midnight dinner with a beloved television actor. The shooter was so nondescript that no one could remember a distinguishing detail about him. One diner said the man picked up a raw oyster on the way out and sucked it from the shell, and apologized to the diner for disturbing his meal.

  I went into Helen’s office and told her everything I had.

  “This sounds like either an East Coast hitter or a maniac,” she said.

  “Or both.”

  “What’s he doing here?” she said.

  “At least we know it probably wasn’t about McVane. But that means the real target is still out there.”

  “Nightingale?”

  “That would be my bet.”

  “You said Nightingale blew you off.”

  “His sister didn’t. She thinks Tony Nemo wants to take Jimmy off the board because Jimmy wants to produce Levon Broussard’s work.”

  “No wonder most films hurt my eyeballs,” she said. She spun her ballpoint on her desk pad.

  “Something else bothering you?”

  “The prosecutor’s office. Lala Segretti thinks you should retire.” She kept her gaze straight ahead, not looking at me. “He says the Dartez homicide and investigation will always be a subject of scandal.”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  “If you go, I go, too.”

  “Nobody got me drunk except me.”

  “The DA has got his head up his ass on this one,” she said.

  “You’re a loyal friend, Helen.”

  She massaged the back of her neck with both hands, her breasts swelling against her shirt. “And shit goes great with vanilla ice cream.”

  I didn’t try to think through that last one.

  I LOOKED AT the array of notes, file folders, and photos on my desk. I had cases that had been open fifteen years. Most of them would never be solved. I knew inmates who were innocent of the crimes they were in for but guilty of far more serious ones, including homicides. I knew scores of politicians who sold out their constituencies on a daily basis and were lauded for it. Every cop has a private ulcer about a particular child molester who skates, a victim of sexual assault who’s hung out to dry by a misogynistic judge, a greaseball who plays the role of a family man while he extorts and ruins small businessmen, or a racist cop whose behavior puts shooters on rooftops.

  How do you handle it when your anger brims over the edge of the pot? You use the shortened version of the Serenity Prayer, which is “Fuck it.” Like Voltaire’s Candide tending his own garden or the British infantry going up the Khyber Pass one bloody foot at a time, you do your job, and you grin and walk through the cannon smoke, and you just keep saying fuck it. You also have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life. “Fuck it” is not profanity. “Fuck it” is a sonnet.

  In this instance, that meant I had to trust my own perceptions about several open cases I believed were connected. At the bottom of the pyramid were the Jeff Davis Eight. The cultural background was prostitution and narcotics and white slavery. Kevin Penny was a player. He had ties with the Nightingale family, of what kind I wasn’t sure. A witness put Penny at the site of the Dartez murder. Why was he there? Had he been sent to follow me and do me harm? Probably, although I had gone to his trailer later and he had seemed unsure of my identity, which meant he had never gotten a good look at me the night Dartez was killed.

  Then there was Spade Labiche. Labiche had been seen with Penny right before the Dartez killing. His prints were also in Penny’s trailer, though he claimed he had been there to interview Penny and for no other reason.

  In the mix were Tony Nine Ball, Jimmy and Emmeline Nightingale, and Levon and Rowena Broussard, and finally, the attack upon Rowena by Jimmy.

  Strangely enough, I believed the key lay in the torture death of Penny and the rape of Rowena. The question marks in both cases seemed endless. Who would put Penny through such an ordeal? My guess was Tony Nine Ball. Sherry Picard had said Penny was a federal informant. In his younger years, Tony’s logo was a bloody baseball bat. But Tony’s victims were either left alive or disappeared altogether. They weren’t left at a crime scene with toggle bolts drilled through their limbs.

  Another issue was Levon’s apparent lack of interest in prosecuting Jimmy Nightingale, the same man whose face he’d spat into. Levon was the kind of idealist you admired but also feared. He seemed to have the inclinations of a pacifist but owned a large number of firearms. He despised dictators and demagogues but revered his ancestors in gray who were authoritarian in their own fashion. He had been a leftist in Latin America, then traveled to Cuba and been picked up by the secret police and confined for a month in a hellish place filled with cockroaches and lice and feces. In my opinion, Levon and Jimmy Nightingale were opposite sides of the same coin. Neither understood himself. And without knowing it, both of them probably served an agenda created for them by someone else, perhaps long dead.

  From a professional perspective, my investigation into the rape of Rowena Broussard was over. But I couldn’t let it go. Something was wrong. Why the continued coldness or hostility from both her and her husband? Wouldn’t they conclude that the wheels of justice were going forward? Jimmy had been charged and indicted and held up in the public eye as a rapist. Maybe his political career would be destroyed. Rowena would probably be a devastating witness at the trial. What more did they want?

  I drove to their house on Loreauville Road.

  * * *

  LEVON AND HIS wife were eating at a dining table in their screened-in, brick-floored back porch. Even though we were in the midst of spring, the evening sky was lit incongruously with the colors of a Halloween pumpkin. Rowena’s wrists were still bandaged. Levon wore a sport shirt and slacks and Roman sandals without socks. He didn’t stand up to shake hands when I opened the screen door. For a man of his background, that message was as blunt as it got.

  “Sorry I didn’t call in advance,” I said.

  “What do you need, Dave?”

  “You heard about the shooting of the cop in St. Mary?”

  “On the roadside, something like that?”

  “It happened not far from Jimmy Nightingale’s place,” I said.

  “We’re eating,” Rowena said.

  “I noticed,” I replied.

  Levon’s eyes lifted to mine. “Say what’s on your mind.”

  “Long ago I learned that hostility and fear are first cousins,” I said.

  “Big breakthrough?” he said.

  “It beats cancer and heart disease.”

  “Let me make it easy for you,” he said. “You feel we’re ungrateful. We’re not. But we’re not happy, either. You’re too close to Nightingale. You did your job, but you did it grudgingly.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  I waited for his reply. Or rather, I hoped he might act like the genteel man he was and
ask me to sit down. I didn’t mention that hostility was also a first cousin of guilt. Again I noticed the leanness in his face, the pinched light in his eyes, as though an illness were taking over his body. Then I said what had probably been in my subconscious for a long time. “You saw the dark side in Latin America.”

  “So?”

  “The use of electrodes. People hung by their wrists with a sack of insecticide pulled over their heads.”

  “Worse than that,” he said.

  “How far would you be willing to go yourself?”

  He set down his knife and fork and stared at the two candles burning on the table. “I don’t think I heard you right.”

  “Maybe you went looking for evidence on your own. Maybe you used a PI to check out Nightingale’s employees and came up with Kevin Penny’s name. Maybe you thought he was a guy who’d have some useful information.”

  “I tortured somebody to death?” he said.

  “It’s the stuff of the Inquisition.”

  “I can’t take any more of this,” Rowena said.

  She left the table and went through the kitchen door into the house. I leaned over the table as though to speak to him and let my hand tip his wineglass. It rolled off the table and shattered on the brick. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can say that again,” he said. He got up, wiping his trousers, then went in the house for a broom and dustpan. I used my handkerchief to pick up his butter knife and drop it into my pocket. He came back outside. “You’re still here?”

  “I always respected you and your wife, Levon. Don’t pretend I didn’t.”

  “You pretend about everything, Dave. Jimmy Nightingale has all the trappings of a fascist. Tell me that’s not so.”

  “He shitcanned Bobby Earl.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t need him anymore,” he said. “Why don’t you genuflect before him while you’re at it?”

  “See you around,” I said.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” he replied.

  * * *

  I WENT TO the lab early Tuesday morning. They lifted Levon’s prints off the knife, and I took them on a card to Jennings and left them with a desk sergeant for Sherry Picard. She called me the next day. I had not given her any directions or information about the source of the latents on the knife, maybe in part because I didn’t want to confirm my own suspicions.