Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  “They’re a match,” she said.

  “With what?”

  “The latents in Penny’s trailer. That’s why you sent them, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Whose are they?” she asked.

  “Levon Broussard’s.”

  “The author?” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “They were on two doorknobs. They were also on the drill.”

  My heart was in my throat. “Were there any others on the drill?”

  “Just his.”

  “I guess you guys better get a warrant.”

  I don’t believe I ever spoke sadder words.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY Labiche was not only in my office, he was hooking one haunch on the corner of my desk, flipping a half dollar and catching it. “Good detective work, Robey.”

  “Which detective work?”

  “Bringing down that snooty ass-wipe on Loreauville Road.”

  “Levon Broussard?”

  “Him and his wife both think their shit doesn’t stink.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “He’s in custody. He’ll probably bail out this afternoon. From what I understand, you nailed his dick to his forehead. I guess this might screw up his wife’s rape claim, too.”

  “What does one have to do with the other?”

  “Everything?”

  Labiche was right. I just didn’t want to admit it. “How well did you know Kevin Penny, Spade?”

  “Me? Just from the interview. Why would I know him otherwise?”

  “You worked vice in Miami. Penny was an active guy thereabouts.”

  “Where do you come up with these scenarios?”

  “I think you’re a dirty cop,” I said.

  He stood up, his face constricting. “I gave you a way out of the Dartez beef. I covered for your drunk ass because I’ve had problems of my own.”

  “Good show. No cigar.”

  “Yeah?” He blew air out his nose and smiled. He caught the half dollar and put it away. “You couldn’t carry my jockstrap, Robo.”

  * * *

  LABICHE WAS WRONG about Levon making bail that afternoon. Unlike his counterpart Jimmy Nightingale, Levon didn’t make friends with authorities or politicians he didn’t like. The South has changed in many ways, but beyond the sophistry and hush-puppy platitudes is a core group that is as malignant and hot and sweaty as a torchlit mob flinging a rope over a tree limb. The judge before whom Levon appeared was the Honorable Bienville Tomey. His face had the choleric intensity of a dried squash and the same level of humanity. He wore his irritability like a flag.

  “What the hell do you have to say for yourself?” he asked Levon.

  “Nothing, Your Honor,” Levon answered.

  “You’re entering a plea of not guilty?”

  “Yes, that’s correct, Your Honor,” Levon’s attorney said.

  “I didn’t ask you. The defendant will answer my question.”

  “Yes, sir,” Levon said.

  “Yes, sir, what?”

  Levon looked out the window and didn’t reply.

  “Are you deaf?”

  “I don’t have anything to say, sir.”

  “You mean ‘Your Honor.’ ”

  Levon continued to stare out the window. “I didn’t torture or kill anyone. Interpret that in any way you wish.”

  “Remanded in custody,” the judge said. He snapped down his gavel as he would a fly swatter.

  * * *

  I WAS ALLOWED to see Levon in a holding cell. It was an old one with a concrete floor that sloped down to a drain hole with a yellow-streaked perforated iron lid. There was no bench or chair to sit on. He stood at the door in an orange jumpsuit, his hands on the bars.

  “Why were you in Penny’s trailer?” I said.

  “Rowena remembered something. Actually, it was in a dream. In her dream, the assault by the two black guys was mixed up with the assault on Nightingale’s boat. Then she heard a voice. It was a man with his mouth right by her ear. The pillowcase was over her head, so she couldn’t see his face. She thought it was one of the black guys. It wasn’t. The voice said, ‘Here’s a penny for your thoughts.’ The voice wasn’t Nightingale’s, either.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  When you question a suspect, you do not offer any information unless you want him to think you know more than you do. In this instance, I wanted Levon to give up details that only a perpetrator would know. Unbeknownst to him, he might also give up details that could set him free.

  “When Rowena told me about the dream, I began to think maybe Nightingale wasn’t her attacker, or maybe there was more than one attacker, somebody who held her down. I know a guy who used to work for Nightingale. He gave me the names of almost everybody on his payroll. That’s how I made the connection between Kevin Penny and Rowena’s dream.”

  “Go on.”

  “I went to see him. Nobody answered. The door was unlocked. I opened it and went inside. That’s when I heard him.”

  “Heard him?”

  “He was alive. Moaning. His wrists were bolted to the floor, above his head, like the hanged man in the tarot deck.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He was choking on his vomit. The drill was hanging out of his ear. I removed it and turned his cheek to let his mouth drain. Then he died.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I left.”

  “Why didn’t you call 911?”

  He brushed at his nose. “I don’t know.”

  “Your lawyer will tell you that ‘I don’t know’ is not the way to win people’s hearts and minds.”

  “I told myself Penny had it coming. There wasn’t any point in my getting involved.”

  “You left your prints at the scene. Wouldn’t it be better to explain your presence there than to flee?”

  “I wasn’t thinking, Dave. His eyes were rolled in his head. His face was contorted in a death mask. It was horrible.”

  “You saw the work of the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. I don’t think you rattle that easily.”

  His hands were high on the bars, his head down. “It wasn’t my best day.”

  “You had doubts about Jimmy Nightingale’s guilt?”

  His gaze remained on the floor. His hair was uncut, hanging in his eyes.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” I said. “You didn’t want to let Nightingale off the hook?”

  “He took her to the boat. He got her drunk. He was doing everything he could to get in her pants.”

  “That doesn’t make him a rapist.”

  “If Nightingale didn’t rape her, he knew Penny did.”

  “Not if Nightingale was passed out.”

  “Why not join his defense team?”

  “I don’t have to be here,” I said.

  Somebody slammed a gate. Somebody else dragged a baton across a row of bars. Another someone was yelling gibberish from a cell. Think hell is just in the next world? Visit your average county bag or rental prison.

  “I’ve written about the Jeff Davis Eight,” Levon said. “Look in on Rowena, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell Nightingale this doesn’t change anything. He’s a liar and a fraud, and I’m going to prove it to the world. I hate that son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT, Clete took Homer to a movie in New Iberia, then for ice cream. Homer carried the baseball glove Clete gave him on his belt, and never took off his baseball cap. On the way home, his face looked wizened in the dash light, as though it had been freeze-burned or his youth stolen. He was the most isolated and strange little boy Clete had ever known.

  “They treating you all right at school?” Clete said.

  “Not everybody, but most people do.”

  “You worried about something?”

  “When are they gonna take me back?”

  “Who?”

  “The people who run the foste
r program.”

  “I’m not going to let them do that.”

  The boy stared at nothing for a long time. “I’m glad my father was killed. And that makes me feel bad.”

  Clete turned off Main into the motor court, bouncing Homer in the seat. “Your emotions get mixed up in a situation like that,” Clete said. “See, what you’re glad about is he can’t hurt you anymore.”

  “I feel dirty.”

  “Your father didn’t deserve to have a fine little boy like you.”

  “I feel dirty all the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what they did.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The men who came to the trailer. His friends. I told him about it, but he didn’t care. He called me a liar.”

  Clete pulled the Caddy under the oaks and cut the engine and lights. “Those things were not your fault. Your father was an evil man. So were his friends. If I catch up with the men who hurt you, they’ll never have a chance to hurt anyone again.”

  “They’re gonna take me back. They won’t let you keep me. There’s got to be both a man and woman in the house.”

  “Maybe Miss Carolyn and I will work something out.”

  “I heard you talking to her on the phone. She’s moving in with her mother in Lake Charles. Don’t pretend.”

  “I won’t, Homer. I promise.”

  Homer walked ahead of him into the cottage and turned on the light. Clete heard a hiss from the shadows and stared into the darkness. A tug was droning up the bayou, its running lights on. “Who’s there?”

  “Pookie. I got to talk,” a voice said.

  Clete removed a penlight from his pocket and shone it into the darkness. “You trying to creep my cottage?”

  “I got a flat. Down the street. I got to hide.”

  Clete shone the light on Pookie’s clothes. “Did you wet your pants?”

  “A guy was following me. Not a guy. The guy.”

  “Make sense.”

  “Maybe the guy who smoked that cop in St. Mary Parish. He’s out of Florida. Nobody knows what he looks like. He’s like a cleaner, except he doesn’t just clean. He wipes out everything in the environment. I saw JuJu. He said Maximo is missing, down by Morgan City.”

  “You need to soak your brain in a bucket of Drano, Pookie. I can’t begin to follow the crap coming out of your mouth.”

  “Somebody put the grab on Maximo. He takes his lady on a picnic, then she goes for a whiz, and when she comes back, Maximo has gone into thin air.”

  “The lady is the haystack from outer space?”

  “Show some sensitivity here.”

  “Maximo is a sadist and a pervert. In case you haven’t heard, one of his kids disappeared. The mother thinks Maximo killed him. Did he and JuJu attack Carolyn Ardoin in her driveway?”

  “You already said it, Purcel. If it was Maximo, she wouldn’t have a face.”

  “Get out of here, Pookie.”

  “Listen to me. This guy who was following me wears red tennis shoes and fruity shirts and queer-bait pants. He ain’t out to just cap me. He wants information. You know what that means. T’ink about what somebody done to Kevin Penny.”

  “I can’t help you. Don’t come around here anymore.” Clete went up the stoop and opened the screen door.

  “Don’t leave me like this, no,” Pookie said.

  Clete shut the door and turned the bolt and clicked off the porch light. He looked through the window. Pookie’s arms were thrashing in rage and frustration, as though he were caught in a wind tunnel.

  * * *

  CLETE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Forty years ago he had accepted insomnia as a way of life. For a long time the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape. Sometimes he made a pot of tea for her, then put it and a demitasse and saucer and napkin and tiny spoon on the windowsill, regardless of the terror in his wife’s face. One day the mamasan moved on, and his wife joined a Buddhist cult in Boulder, one in which the members were made to remove their clothes and humiliate themselves, and Clete was left with a sense of desertion and emptiness no amount of booze or redwings or weed could kill.

  At three in the morning he sat up in the bed and looked at the moon. Homer was asleep on the couch, his cap and ball glove by his feet. He had read Clete’s situation correctly: Carolyn Ardoin was moving in with her mother. But that was a small part of the problem. Clete and domesticity didn’t flush. He had tried it in all its forms. The result was always a disaster. He had even seen a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had told him to get a vasectomy and never get drunk in Reno or Vegas, where he might accidentally stumble into a marriage chapel.

  Clete looked at Homer in the moon glow. His skin was pale and his breath so shallow, his nostrils hardly quivered. Clete thought of the bodies of the people buried alive by the Vietcong along the banks of the Perfume River, the dirt clutched in their hands, the waxy look in their faces.

  The world hasn’t treated you right, kid. But I don’t know what either one of us can do about it. If there’s a way, God help me find it.

  * * *

  IN ANY GIVEN twenty-four-hour period, we received a steady flow of reports and complaints about house break-ins, car wrecks, noisy house parties, fights outside bars, domestic disputes, a backed-up septic tank, a water heater that wouldn’t light, the garbage that wasn’t picked up, a sofa dumped in the bayou, a Peeping Tom, an alligator in a swimming pool, another alligator taking a barbecued chicken off a grill, possums chewing through someone’s wiring, a live skunk that kids had put in the high school principal’s car, and sometimes the real deal—a homicide or a felonious assault or an armed robbery.

  The theft of the ice cream truck was a new one. In the late hours, the driver had gassed up in St. Martinville and entered the convenience store for a cup of coffee. When he came back outside, his truck was gone. We added the theft to our list of bizarre occurrences in Acadiana.

  * * *

  IT WAS SATURDAY. The wind was balmy, out of the south, and smelling of salt and rain, when a man in a Jolly Jack ice cream suit and a white stiff-billed hat stopped the truck by a park in a poor black neighborhood near Bayou Lafourche. Happy tunes jingled from the loudspeakers. The driver stuck his head out the window and waved at the children. There were tiny plastic roses on his coat, like candied flowers on cake icing. “Hi, kids! Who wants some ice cream?”

  “We ain’t got no money,” a little girl said.

  “What if I told you the ice cream is free today?” the man said.

  “Then you be lying,” a little boy said.

  The children laughed.

  “My name is Smiley,” the driver said. “I can make my face look like rubber.” He made his face go out of shape.

  They laughed louder this time. “Do it again, Smiley!” someone yelled.

  He hooked his fingers inside his mouth and stretched it until it was almost splitting. “I can speak Spanish. I bet you can’t.”

  “If we could speak it, there wouldn’t be nobody here who could understand it,” the little girl said. “So why do we want to speak it?”

  “That’s pretty good,” the driver said. He rose from his seat and opened a locker behind him. “Hang on, you guys. Here it comes.”

  He was wearing gloves. As fast as he could, he trundled out Popsicles, fudge bars, cups of marbled ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, Eskimo Pies, and frozen sundaes, while more children came running from all over the park. He peeled the paper off the last fudge bar and ate it with them. “How do you like that, kids?”

  “Yea!” they shouted.

  The little girl stuck her head in the door and looked into the rear of the truck. “What’s that sound?” she said.

  “Which sound?”

  “It goes thump, thump, thump.”

  “That’s my refrigerator unit. It’s broken.”

  “It sound like you got a gorilla locked in there,” the little boy said.

  “Maybe that’s what it is,” the driver said.


  “No, it ain’t,” the girl said.

  “I got to go,” the driver said. “Make sure you clean up your trash. Don’t be litterbugs.”

  “You coming here tomorrow, Smiley?” she asked.

  “I got a lot of places to visit. Be good kids.” He raised his hand in farewell.

  “Hey, everybody t’ank Smiley,” the little girl said.

  “T’ank you, Smiley!” they yelled.

  He shifted into gear and drove away, water streaming off his back bumper, the back end swaying and vibrating.

  He stopped at the end of the street and got into the rear of the truck. He opened a large door that gushed with cold. He looked at something on the floor, his jaw tightening. “I told you to be quiet.”

  He held on to the doorjamb for balance and stomped a mouth-taped figure with his red tennis shoe, then stood on the figure’s face for good measure. “You make me very mad. You have been a bad boy. Don’t make me come back here again. I do not like bad boys.”

  * * *

  ON SUNDAY MORNING I got the call.

  “We’ve got a beaut, Pops,” Helen said. “We haven’t been able to get inside the ice cream truck yet, but this looks like one for the books.”

  AT SUNRISE, A man wearing a Jolly Jack vendor’s uniform pulled up to the pumps in the same truck that had been stolen at the same filling station two days previous. He turned off the engine and went inside without buying any gas. He used the restroom, bought a bag of Ding Dongs, and munched them while he read the newspaper in the convenience store. Then he paid for the newspaper and went outside and did something in the back of the truck.

  A minute later, the clerk saw him activate the gas pump with what turned out to be a stolen credit card. The clerk had never seen him before and knew nothing of the truck’s history. The driver was on the other side of the truck, so the clerk assumed he was gassing up. Someone entered the store and said smoke was rising from the back of the truck. The digital counters were racing on the gas pump. The hose and nozzle had been draped over the driver’s window and were sloshing gasoline across the seats and the floor. A flame flickered inside the glass in the rear doors. The driver had disappeared.