Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  The explosion seemed to lift the truck off its wheels, then the fire roared with such intensity that it wilted the roof into carbon paper. One of the customers said he heard the muffled cries of a person inside the flames.

  It took me only ten minutes to reach the site. The firemen had finished hosing down the truck, and one of them was prizing open the back doors with a crowbar. Helen was standing by her cruiser, talking into her mic. I waited for her to finish.

  “What’s that smell?” I said.

  “I hate to think,” she replied. “A car was reported stolen up the road. That’s probably how our man made his getaway.”

  “What’s on the surveillance cameras?”

  “The top of a head wearing a cap. It looks like he had gloves on.”

  “What’s the clerk say?”

  “The guy talked baby talk, like Elmer Fudd, and has lips that were ‘red like licorice.’ Fudd ate a bag of Ding Dongs and read the paper before he set the truck on fire.”

  “This is the same truck that was stolen from here?”

  “You got it.”

  “How do you figure that one?”

  “Our guy’s a nutcase?” she said.

  The fireman was now inside the truck. He used the head of the crowbar to snap loose the handle on the freeze locker and pulled back the door on its hinges. He jumped down from the bumper, the ends of his mustache bouncing. He coughed wetly in his chest. “Y’all better take a look.”

  The man inside the locker was bound hand and foot with ligatures, a strip of heat-baked tape hanging from his mouth. His eyes were wide, like those of someone holding his breath underwater. His forehead and bare feet were crusted with black blood, his hair and eyebrows singed, his clothes covered with burn holes. His skin had turned to orange marmalade. I hoped he had died of asphyxiation or a heart attack rather than from the burning gasoline that had curled around the bottom of the freeze locker.

  “Recognize him?” Helen said.

  “It’s Maximo Soza.”

  “That’s him? I remember him being larger.”

  “He was a small man inside and out.”

  “Who’s the guy in the Jolly Jack suit?”

  “I think the same guy who shot McVane.”

  “How do you arrive at that?”

  “He commits crimes no one would suspect him of. He does it for reasons that make sense to him but no one else. He builds the gallows and drops the trapdoor before anyone realizes he’s not a carpenter.”

  “Who would want to pop one of Tony Squid’s guys?”

  “Somebody who wants information about Tony or somebody who plans on popping Tony.”

  “Mob guys don’t get popped without permission,” she said.

  “That was in the old days. Whoever did this plans to leave a big footprint.”

  * * *

  AT 7:38 SUNDAY evening, I got a call from the man himself. “I’m all broken up. What the fuck is going on over there in Mosquito Town?”

  “You said you were not going to call here again, Tony,” I said.

  “Maximo was like a son to me.”

  “Yeah, he was a great guy. Maybe he tortured Kevin Penny to death or put a kindhearted social worker in Lafayette General.”

  “My people don’t do those kinds of things.”

  “If the price were right, your people would work at Auschwitz.”

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I need to talk to her about the script. You’re not gonna believe who I got to play the role of the Confederate soldier.”

  When he told me, he was right, I couldn’t believe him. The actor was well known and respected; he’d received a Golden Globe Award and other nominations.

  “I told him Alafair was doing the script,” Tony said. “She’s gonna love working with him.”

  “I can’t tell quite how I feel at this moment.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Where do you get off using Alafair’s name in your business dealings?”

  “I’m giving her a break.”

  “The only break here is going to be in your fat neck,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Maximo went out hard, Tony. Think about the implications. Ten years ago nobody would have touched one of your guys.”

  “Put her on the phone.”

  “Are you listening? My daughter is never going to work with you.”

  “Yeah? My lawyer already talked with Levon Broussard in the can. He wants Alafair to do the script.”

  “Levon wants to work with you?”

  “Not exactly. But he will. He wants to get even with Nightingale. This is gonna be like a telephone pole with spikes in it kicked right up Nightingale’s ass.”

  “I thought you were going to put him in the White House.”

  “Nightingale is a Benedict Arnold. I kept the unions off his back, introduced him to people with billions of dollars, got him a girlfriend or two. Then one day I’m the stink on shit.”

  “A heads-up, Tony: If a guy who talks like Elmer Fudd and has lips like red licorice shows up at your house, don’t invite him in.”

  “I’m supposed to be afraid of a guy who escaped from a Bugs Bunny cartoon?”

  “I think he capped two black guys in Algiers and blew a cop’s brains out in St. Mary Parish. For a while I thought he might be working for you. Now I think you’re a target.”

  “You know why you’re a cop? You’re dumb and can’t do anything else. For years Maximo had a thing for little boys. One of his victims caught up with him. Fade to black.”

  “Sounds more like your epitaph, Tony.”

  “My dork in your ear, Robicheaux,” he replied, and hung up.

  In the morning, the judge who had remanded Levon Broussard changed his mind and released him on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T KNOW what to make of Levon’s story about Kevin Penny. Levon had deduced that Kevin Penny had probably raped his wife but had allowed us to continue our prosecution of an innocent man. Then Levon had gone on his own to Penny’s trailer, supposedly to confront him, and had left his fingerprints on the electric drill that had taken Penny’s life, supposedly while trying to save him from drowning in his own vomit. But he hadn’t called 911. Why hadn’t he? He wasn’t the kind of man who panicked. His account was a hard sell.

  Maybe Levon didn’t care whether Jimmy was guilty of the actual rape. He blamed Jimmy regardless. As for most of us who seek revenge, his anger and need probably had their origins in the past, and the present situation was a surrogate for an injury that had occurred long ago. Levon’s wife had been raped and then abandoned by the system in Wichita, Kansas. I also believed his liberal sentiments and his commitment to civil rights were sorely tested by the fact that the rapists were black.

  Two hours after his release from a lockdown unit in Jennings, I found him in his backyard, unshaven, red-eyed, dirty, and still smelling of jail. He was flinging baseballs at a wooden box he had nailed to the side of his carriage house. I had forgotten that he’d played American Legion ball. I had also forgotten that he’d attended a military academy in Mississippi, if only for one year, at the end of which he had been expelled for knocking down an instructor who insulted his family.

  The ground was littered with baseballs. A cooler with a corked bottle of white wine pushed down in the ice rested on a picnic table.

  “Pretty good forkball,” I said.

  He looked at me blankly. “There’s a soda in the box, if you want one.”

  “The prosecutor’s office is a bit upset.”

  “Because they’ll have to drop charges against Nightingale?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “That’s their problem.” He took a windup and fired the ball into the center of the wooden box, putting his shoulder and hip into it, whipping his wrist just before releasing his fingers.

  “You and Jimmy have a lot in common.”

  “No, we do
n’t.”

  “You both played ball, and you both went to military school.”

  “I didn’t know that. You know why boys get sent to military school? Their parents don’t want them.”

  “Are you going in on a movie deal with Tony Nemo?”

  “If Alafair does the adaptation.”

  “What you do with Fat Tony is your business. But I don’t want you dragging my daughter into it.”

  He tossed a baseball up and down in his hand, then let it fall to the grass. “Alafair is my friend. You think I’d hurt her?”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “Then give me some credit.”

  “Nemo is an evil man. Don’t darken your life with this guy.”

  “Nightingale knows how to place his thumb on the pulse of an unhappy electorate. Individuals don’t change history. History finds the individual. John Steinbeck said that.”

  “So let the electorate fall in their own shit.”

  “I don’t doubt Nemo got me sprung. If Alafair will do the first draft, I’m going to make a movie with him. I’ll tell you the reason why. My best novel is the least popular of my books. Maybe this is vanity on my part, but I believe we owe the dead a debt. We have to give them breath and voice, even though their mouths are stopped with dirt. If we don’t, they allow us no rest. I think they’re out there in the mist. Sometimes I see them.”

  I felt a wind blow through my chest, as though he had pirated my thoughts.

  “How’s your wife doing?” I asked.

  “Not good.”

  “Can I ask you something straight up, off the record?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is it fair to say you’re still hanging on to the events in Wichita?”

  “Events?”

  “The rape of your wife by the two black guys.”

  “No, I let go of that a long time ago.”

  “I don’t believe you. People’s emotions don’t work like that.”

  He slid the wine bottle out of the ice and uncorked it and took a drink from the bottle. “One of them was knifed to death in the Alabama state pen. A store owner shot and killed the other one during a robbery. They got what they had coming.”

  “But they skated in Wichita,” I said.

  “So that’s on the DA’s office in Wichita. Fuck them.”

  “Good attitude. But my experience is that survivors of violent crimes tend to become gun enthusiasts.”

  He winked. “I throw baseballs.”

  “Jimmy hits golf balls into the bayou.”

  “May I visit Alafair at your house?”

  “Anytime,” I replied.

  I walked back to my pickup. Rowena was sitting in a rocking chair on the gallery. “Mr. Robicheaux?”

  I tried to keep my face pleasant, but I didn’t speak.

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “All of it. I got drunk with another man when I should have been home with my husband. I gave you people the wrong information. I caused Levon to go to Kevin Penny’s trailer. These things are all my doing.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “You’re a nice lady, Miss Rowena.”

  There was a smile in her eyes. It’s strange how much a kind word can do.

  * * *

  CLETE PURCEL WAS the most thorough and insightful and successful investigative lawman I ever knew. If he hadn’t wiped out his career with hooch and pills and weed and strippers and other women who glowed with neurosis, he could have had a job in the Department of Justice. Instead, he ended up working with the Mob in Vegas and Reno. I’ll take it a step further. He ended up working for a degenerate killer named Sally Dio, also known as Sally Ducks, who had his boys slam Clete’s hand in a car door. Later, Sally was on his private plane with his boys when the engines failed and the plane crashed into the side of a mountain near Flathead Lake. The coroner had to comb Sally’s remains from a tree with a rake. The National Transportation Safety Board said the fuel lines were clogged with sand. For unexplained reasons, Clete immediately grabbed a flight to Mexico City with only his toothbrush and a shaving kit.

  Clete drove his Caddy down East Plaquemine Street in Jennings to the sheriff’s office. The sky was lidded with steel-gray clouds, the air muggy and superheated by the asphalt, the live oaks and palm trees motionless. The building was located in a strange piece of green landscape that had a few small frame houses on it, none of them with fences, like a semirural neighborhood from a simpler time.

  He left his .38 snub and holster in the glove box, put on his porkpie hat, locked his car, and went up the walk, touching his face with a folded handkerchief, his collar and his own odor bothering him. The problem did not lie in the weather. Clete could have overcome his reputation for vigilantism and chaotic behavior, but his brief association with the Mob and his accidental shooting of a federal witness followed him wherever he went, in part because he was a better man and a better and more honorable cop than his detractors could ever be. But that was poor consolation. Among those who should have been his colleagues and friends, he was a pariah and a turncoat.

  “I’d like to see Detective Picard,” he said to the desk sergeant.

  “Name?”

  “Purcel.”

  “Ohhh, yeah,” the sergeant said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s been that kind of day.”

  “How about it, top? Is she here or not?”

  “Down the hall.”

  “Would you mind telling her I’m here? I don’t have an appointment.”

  “She’ll be glad for the company.”

  He removed his porkpie hat and ran a comb through his hair and put the comb away. He yawned, his eyes empty. “You got any openings? I’d really dig working in a place like this. It reminds me of El Sal when it was run by the death squads.”

  “I’ll make a note of that,” the sergeant said.

  Clete went down the hall and tapped on Sherry Picard’s half-open door. She was on the phone but waved him in. She smiled when she hung up. “How you doin’, Mr. Purcel?”

  “Clete.”

  “How you doin’, Mr. Clete?”

  He gave her a look. “I want to run a couple of things by you regarding the Penny homicide.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Am I about to put my head in a bear trap?” he said.

  “I was on the phone with social services.”

  “About Homer?”

  “I think maybe they found a good home for him.”

  He felt a thorn pierce his heart. “He’s got one now.”

  “It’s only temporary. You have to accept that.”

  “Right is right, wrong is wrong. I’m not big on rule books.”

  “How did you make it through the Corps?”

  “The Crotch was a breeze after New Orleans.”

  “What’d you want to tell me?”

  “Remember when we were talking about the latents at the Penny crime scene that weren’t in the system? You said it bothered you because a guy like Penny didn’t hang out with normal people.”

  “Right.”

  “Run everybody who works for Jimmy Nightingale. Also start looking hard at Spade Labiche.”

  “I can’t randomly pull in people and fingerprint them, particularly when they’re from St. Mary Parish.”

  “There’re other ways.”

  “I know your methodology. I want to keep my job. I’ve got another problem, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “You and Dave Robicheaux have a way of getting into it with rich guys. It doesn’t do a lot for your credibility.”

  “I’ll try to explain that. Most rich people here made their money off somebody else’s back.”

  She looked him up and down, biting the edge of her lip. Unconsciously, he put his thumb in his belt and tightened his shirt.

  “You got anything on Nightingale?” she said.

  “Penny said he made deposits for Nightingale and delivered skanks to Nightingale�
�s house.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t like Nightingale. I think he’s a bum. Not because he’s rich. Around here, you screw down and marry up. He doesn’t marry up. He just screws everybody. In answer to your question, nothing Penny said was trustworthy. He told me Nightingale’s sister came on to him. I have a hard time buying that.”

  “The feds used him for a long time. They must have believed him.”

  “Yeah, they did the same with Whitey Bulger. Look, I came here because I thought you could use a friend.”

  “Why do I need a friend?” she said.

  “You work in a shithole.”

  “You’re here to tell me I work in a shithole?”

  “It’s all relative. Can I sit down?” he said.

  “I have a lot of work to do.”

  “Don’t take Homer away.”

  “It’s not in my hands. The system is the system.”

  “I say fuck the system, Miss Sherry.”

  “Where has that gotten you, sir?”

  He felt his eyes go out of focus and wondered if it had to do with the brightness of the sun shining through the window. “I’m a PI. When I had a real badge, I never jammed anybody. I didn’t do it then, I don’t do it now.”

  Her eyes left his.

  “They give you a bad time here?” he asked.

  “I get time off from purgatory,” she said. “Watch your ass, bub.”

  When he went outside, his Caddy was being hauled away by a wrecker. The desk sergeant was watching from the curb. “You were in a no-parking zone.”

  * * *

  ALAFAIR WAS COMING out of Victor’s Cafeteria when she saw Labiche. He was driving a cruiser, looking in the rearview mirror. When he saw her, he swung out of his lane, causing two other drivers to brake. He parked in the shade and got out. He had a gold-tipped cigarette in his mouth. He looked warily up and down the street. “Got a minute?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “It’s important. About our last conversation. Misunderstandings that got to be cleared up.”

  “There’s nothing to be cleared up, Detective.”

  He turned his face and exhaled the smoke into the wind, then dropped the cigarette onto the sidewalk and stepped on it. “Your father thought I was putting moves on you or something. Robey gets steamed up.”