Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  A little boy wandered next to him. The man in tennis shoes patted him on the head. “What’s your name, little fella?”

  Before the child could answer, his mother jerked him away.

  “Why’d you do that?” the man said to her.

  “He’s not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  The man took her measure, his face crumpling. “I don’t think I like you.”

  She hurried to her car with the child, looking nervously over her shoulder. The man drove into a trailer court inside an oak grove on the far side of the service road, and ate a sack lunch on a picnic table with people from the trailers. Smoke drifted from barbecue grills into the trees. A ball game was being broadcast from a radio placed on a windowsill. The man in tennis shoes flagged down an ice cream truck and bought Popsicles for any kid who wanted one. Then he walked on his hands and did flips across the grass, filling the children with delight.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, JUJU Ladrine and Pookie Domingue stopped at a fruit and watermelon stand located not far from the drawbridge at Nelson’s Canal, a historical site that few cared about and where retreating Confederates tried to stop Nathaniel Banks’s invasion into southwestern Louisiana in the spring of 1863.

  On the far side of the four-lane street were a drawbridge, a church, a pecan orchard, and a pasture with horses in it. The evening star was winking in the west, the light in the trees as bright as a flame, the wind smelling of distant rain. Pookie and JuJu ordered big bleeding slices of rattlesnake melon served on paper plates with plastic forks and a roll of paper towels for napkins. They sprinkled their melon with salt and dug in, chewing with their mouths open, enjoying the grandeur of the evening.

  Opposite the stand was a huge sugarcane field where the cane was hardly more than green tentacles waving in the wind. In the distance, a solitary truck was parked on a dirt road.

  “There was some kind of battle here?” JuJu said.

  “Nothing like the battles at Vicksburg or places like that,” Pookie said.

  “That was in the Civil War?”

  “Yeah, between the Nort’ and the Sout’,” Pookie said.

  “Back in the 1960s, over civil rights and shit?”

  Pookie stared at the side of JuJu’s face. JuJu had been scratching at his scalp and was looking at his nails.

  “Where’d you go to school?” Pookie asked.

  “After the fourt’ grade, I didn’t go nowhere.”

  “You could fool me,” Pookie said.

  A black kid was unloading melons and cantaloupes from a flatbed trailer behind their table. Behind the truck on the dirt road, there was a flash of light and a puff of smoke, then a sound like the pop of a wet firecracker. JuJu touched his forehead. “What’s with this?”

  “What’s what?” Pookie said.

  “I got watermelon in my hair.”

  Pookie looked over his shoulder. “The kid was t’rowing melons around. Hey, kid! Ease up on t’rowing them melons.”

  “I wasn’t t’rowing no melons,” the kid said.

  “Then why is slop running down your pile?” Pookie said to JuJu.

  “Is there somewhere around here we can get laid?” JuJu said.

  “Your friend Maximo gets clipped by a guy with a birdcage for a brain and you’re talking about cooze?”

  “I got the creeps,” JuJu said.

  “What you got is a walking nervous breakdown you came out of the womb wit’.”

  The wind changed, and Pookie thought he heard another solitary pop. He felt something wet on his face. JuJu’s head was teetering on his shoulders, then it sank in his plate. Pookie stared across the field at the truck and at the early cane bending in the wind and at the amber-tinged twilight glinting on the train tracks, as though he were being drawn against his will into a historical photograph that would have no importance to anyone except him. For a brief moment, he wanted desperately to relive his life and change every thought and deed and event in it, even the ones that were good, in order to alter the sequence of events that had placed him near a site where ragged specters in gray and butternut took their revenge upon the quick.

  THE SUN WAS low in the west, flooding the crime scene with a red glow, when I arrived. Helen arrived minutes later. Someone had pulled a polyethylene tarp over the two bodies that sat slumped at the picnic table. An ambulance, three cruisers, and a fire truck had pulled onto the grass. The crime scene tape was already up. Cars were slowing at the intersection, people gawking from the windows. Spade Labiche was waiting for us. “Better take a look,” he said.

  I lifted up a corner of the tarp, high enough to see both victims without exposing their state to people on the other side of the tape.

  “Jesus,” Helen said.

  I lowered the tarp. “The entry wounds are in the front.”

  “There’s splatter on the flatbed behind them,” Labiche said. “One guy says he thought he heard a backfire. A woman says she heard firecrackers.”

  “From where?” I said.

  “Across the road,” he said.

  The sugarcane field was empty, the sky lavender and full of birds. A dust devil spun across the rows, wobbling, then broke apart.

  I walked over to the trailer where a black kid had been stacking or unloading melons. Three melons were cored or broken. There was no bullet hole in the trailer that I could see. Farther down the street were houses and small businesses. I talked with the black kid, who was still shaken by what he had witnessed. “One guy was wiping melon out of his hair, then his whole head blowed off. Man, I ain’t up for dis.”

  “Did you see anyone out there in the field?” I asked.

  “No, suh. Wait. I seen a truck.”

  “Did you see the truck go somewhere?”

  “No, suh, I ain’t.”

  “You see anything else? Think about it.”

  “Maybe a flash behind the truck.”

  “You see a man?”

  “I cain’t remember.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Let’s talk again later.” I gave him my card and joined Helen.

  “Want me to start knocking on doors?” Labiche said.

  “Yeah, while we have daylight,” Helen said. “Good job.”

  “We’ll get this guy,” he said. “Right, Dave?”

  I didn’t answer. He shrugged and walked off.

  “Good job?” I said to Helen.

  “Give the devil his due,” she said.

  “Remind me to keep my own counsel.”

  A Jeff Davis Parish sheriff’s cruiser, its flasher rippling, pulled onto the grass and stopped at the tape. Sherry Picard got out, her badge on her belt. “Mind if I get in on this?”

  “What’s this got to do with Jeff Davis?” Helen said.

  “This is probably connected to the hit on Kevin Penny,” she said. “Penny is my case.”

  “Help yourself,” Helen said.

  “Who’s the vic?” Sherry said.

  “Vics,” Helen said. “Pookie Domingue and JuJu Ladrine.”

  “Can I?” she said, holding the corner of the tarp.

  Helen nodded.

  Sherry pulled up the tarp, her face impassive. She lowered it again and looked over her shoulder at the field. “The shots came from out there?” she said.

  “That’s the way it looks,” I said.

  “It was probably done with a fifty-caliber. I’m thinking an M107 sniper rifle.”

  “Where’d you come up with that?” Helen said.

  “I used one,” Sherry said.

  “Pardon?” Helen said.

  “In Afghanistan.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” I said to both of them.

  We crossed the road and walked several hundred yards to a spot where a heavy vehicle had parked and then backed in a semicircle and driven away on its own tire marks. The ground was soft and moist, the impressions sharply stenciled. There were shoeprints by the tire tracks.

  Helen got on her radio. “We need some tape in the field.”


  “This is my guess,” Sherry said. “The shooter set up a bipod on his vehicle and fired through a space in the traffic. That means he’s very good. The first shot was high. The second and third were on the mark. The M107 is a semi-auto. Unless he fired from inside the truck, the brass must have hit the ground.”

  But there was no brass on the ground. If the shooter used a semi-auto outside the truck, he had picked up his spent cartridges, which only cops and professional hitters do.

  “You got any idea who this guy is?” Helen said to Sherry.

  “Somebody who doesn’t care if he drills a hole in a house one mile away and kills a child in a high chair,” Sherry answered.

  * * *

  OUR LITTLE TOWN was not emotionally equipped to deal with the presence of a contract killer. Oh, yes, we’re a libertine and atavistic people with a patina of Christianity, but by and large, our self-indulgence is that of children and perhaps even an expansion of Christ’s recommendation to abide Caesar. Fear spread throughout the town, and Bobby Earl tried to insert himself into the mix, appearing on local television, speculating that Islamic terrorism was at the root of things. But Earl was an amateur, a race-baiter who had faded away with the Klan and the sweaty redneck demagogues shouting through megaphones on the bed of a cotton wagon.

  Jimmy Nightingale, however, had found his voice. He, too, appeared on television, usually with police officials or a respected politician at his side. He was avuncular and assuring. He praised law enforcement, the Constitution, our way of life, our people in uniform overseas. As I looked at him on the screen, I believed Jimmy’s time had come around.

  Another figure showed up prominently, as is usual when we lose faith in ourselves and reach out for the worst members of our species. Tony Nemo was back in town, in a chauffeured steel-gray limo with charcoaled windows that hid the identities of either celebrities or individuals who would make small-town souls uncomfortable. He reserved the old Evangeline Theater, built on Main Street in 1929, for what he told The Daily Iberian was “a screening” of his work. The two films were The Attack of the Worm People and Ninja Surf Vixens.

  After the screening, he threw a grand party in City Park, with barbecue and dirty rice and kegs of beer and crawfish boiling in caldrons filled with artichokes and corn on the cob. The oaks were strung with Japanese lanterns; a Cajun band played “La Jolie Blon” and “Allons à Lafayette” and Clifton Chenier’s signature song, “Ay-Te Te Fee.” I sat in my backyard and watched it from across the bayou. A few feet away, I could see the hooded eyes of an alligator among the cattails. Mon Tee Coon was eating from a can of cat food on the picnic table. The band played “La Jolie Blon” a second time. For me, there is no more haunting ballad in the world. Its origins go back to the eighteenth century, but the rendition by Harry Choates is the one that never leaves you.

  Harry was born in either Rayne, Louisiana, or New Iberia, no one ever knew. He composed and sang in French but didn’t know how to speak it. He sold his song for a hundred dollars and a bottle of booze and died drunk or was beaten to death by cops in the Austin city jail. The oddity of Harry’s song is that you don’t have to speak French to understand it. You know immediately it’s about mortality and a lost way of life. Cajun culture is parodied and ridiculed; it is also treated as quaint and commercially exploited and vulgarized. But the travail of the Acadians was real, and so was the love affair of Evangeline on the banks of Bayou Teche, written about by Longfellow. Whenever someone asks me what southern Louisiana used to look like, and what has been despoiled by industrial polluters and Louisiana’s corrupt politicians, I suggest they listen to Harry’s lament. In my opinion, anyone who can be indifferent to this song has a spiritual affliction.

  I heard Alafair behind me. Mon Tee Coon glanced up and went back to eating. Alafair picked up a pecan that was still in the husk and tossed it at the alligator’s head. He ducked under the lily pads, his tail slapping water on the bank.

  “What’s the haps, Baby Squanto?” I said.

  “We have Visigoths in the driveway.”

  I waited, dreading the rest of it.

  “Tony Nemo,” she said.

  “Who’s with him?”

  “Levon Broussard.”

  “Are you going to work with these guys, Alf?”

  “I’ll do the adaptation with Levon. I won’t be on the set.”

  Ouch, I thought. “What’s Nemo want?”

  “I didn’t ask. They’re drinking champagne in the back of the limo. You want me to blow them off?”

  I got up from my deck chair. “Nope.” I walked into the front yard. The limo was the color of a shark. The back door was open. Levon was standing on the grass, his tie pulled loose, a dark green bottle in his hand. “I’ve got a table by the band. I thought you might like to sit with Rowena and me.”

  I could see Tony’s dark massivity piled in the backseat. “No, thanks.”

  “I owe you an amends. Isn’t that what you twelve-step people call it?”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “You’re an intelligent, educated man, Dave. But you don’t listen. Jimmy Nightingale is going to cause a lot of harm in the world.”

  “You should know. The guy in the backseat gave him his start in politics.”

  “Well, Tony doesn’t feel that way now.”

  “Quit lying to yourself,” I said. “Lie to yourself and you’re never the same again.”

  “Say anything of me you wish. I’m going to bring Nightingale down.”

  “What you’re doing is serving a diseased fat slob with a penis for a brain.”

  “What was that?” Tony said.

  “I’m glad you dropped by,” I replied. “I’ve had a problem of conscience about you.”

  His face looked like a bowl of mashed potatoes. He took a hit from his oxygen cup. Rowena sat next to him, obviously embarrassed. A movie star whose name I won’t use sat in the shadows, a champagne glass balanced on his knee. He was handsome in the way that superficial people are, his jaw firm, his teeth capped, his manner easy and detached, as though a greater world awaited his presence.

  “What’s this about conscience?” Tony said.

  “I think you’re in danger,” I said. “I think the guy who took out Maximo and JuJu and Pookie Domingue has you on his list.”

  “People love me. Why’s this guy want to hurt me?”

  “Why’d he want to clip Maximo and JuJu?” I said.

  “They had enemies. I’m not the only guy they worked for.”

  “The killer has a fifty-caliber sniper rifle, Tony. It has a box magazine that holds ten rounds. It’s accurate for a mile. I’d stay indoors if I were you.”

  “Hey, Levon, let’s get out of here,” Tony said. “This guy is nuts.”

  “Nightingale is behind this, Dave,” Levon said.

  “Yeah, I heard he invented original sin, too,” I replied.

  “Good line,” he said. “Check with you later.”

  “Alafair made a choice against my wishes,” I said. “Treat her right.”

  Levon tried to smile and let the remark pass, but there was no hiding the injury in his eyes.

  One hour later, he was back in our yard on foot, drunk, his coat gone, his sleeves rolled. “You don’t think I’d treat Alafair right?” he said. “Where do you get off with that?”

  I turned on the gallery light and went down the steps. Alafair stood in the doorway.

  “Lose the attitude,” I said.

  “You’re accusing me of dishonorable conduct.”

  “This isn’t about you. It’s about my daughter.”

  “She’s a grown woman.”

  “Not for me. Not for any father. This isn’t 1865. Pull your head out of your ass.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said.

  “Wrong about what?”

  “It is 1865. You never quit the field. The battle is never over.”

  “You’re going to defeat the forces of evil by joining up with Tony Nemo? Stop being a foo
l.”

  “A pox on you, Dave Robicheaux. You’re the one person who should know better.”

  And that’s the way he left it, stumbling down the street, tripping where the sidewalk had been wedged up by giant live oaks, talking to himself. Then he did something I will never understand, nor do I wish to understand, because it truly scared me. He stopped in front of the Shadows and stared through its piked fence as though having a conversation with people, perhaps comrades in arms, whom no one else could see. I do not believe it was an illusion on my part. Nor do I believe he was deranged. I believed Levon was who he was, and that was what scared me about him.

  TWO MONTHS PASSED. The man in red tennis shoes seemed to have disappeared. The days were long and hot, the palm fronds and banana plants rattling dryly when the wind blew. Years ago, during the summer, rain showers fell throughout southern Louisiana at almost exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Now the gumbo soil in the sugarcane field was baked as hard as ceramic and cracked just as easily.

  Most people believe that law enforcement and the solving of crimes and the apprehension and prosecution of criminals proceed in a systematic, linear fashion. The opposite is true. A successful outcome is usually produced by informants and dumb luck. The waiting, the missed opportunities, the bureaucracy, the tainted or lost evidence, the witnesses who change their accounts are endless. Lassitude, frustration, and anger become a way of life.

  Mrs. Dartez continued to tell anyone who would listen that I was the murderer of her husband. The prosecution of Levon Broussard for the murder of Kevin Penny crept forward in Jefferson Davis Parish. Location scouts and line producers working for Levon and Tony Nine Ball began arriving in town, with all the attendant excitement. Homer was taken away from Clete and placed in a foster home, but he ran away and crawled through a window in Clete’s cottage and hid there for two days until Clete returned from his office in New Orleans. So far, the social welfare agency had not tried to take him back. Alafair finished her initial adaptation of Levon’s book, then consented to do the polish and to stay on the set after production began. Levon was drunk a lot. I went to meetings. Spade Labiche stayed in the background and said little, although I still believed that every day was his Ides of March. And no one talked anymore about the Jeff Davis Eight.