Robicheaux: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

  The woman pulled herself up on the ladder and got out of the pool, her rump dripping. She seemed very angry and shook her finger at the man clinging to the pool gutter, his face turned up to hers.

  Chester wondered if the man with the stupid face had tried to put his hand somewhere he shouldn’t have. If that was true, Chester wanted to kill him. And not all at once. Bad men deserved bad things, and Chester knew how to do all of them. He began to breathe heavily again, frustrated with himself and with the restraints placed upon him. He shouldn’t have come here. Or wheeled his suitcase down the two-lane road by the bayou, thereby drawing the attention of the deputy he was forced to kill. The job and the places were always on the cards. There were no cards that showed him in a boathouse, gripping an M107 with both hands.

  But these were things he had to do, whether others liked them or not. He had survived at the orphanage and on the streets of Mexican border towns where children were rented by the hour. Today he had power that he wanted to take back in time and use on all those who had exploited his little body. But that was not the way it worked. Time did not take away the pain; nor did it allow him to use his skills on people out of the past who waited for him in his sleep.

  Chester got up and realized there was a wet spot the size of a quarter in his underwear. Although no one was in sight, he felt his face burning as he walked back to the car and dropped the rifle into the trunk. He drove straight to a Dairy Queen in Franklin and cleaned himself in a restroom, then sat at a wooden table in the shade and began eating a paper plate full of ice cream sandwiches.

  Three teenagers sat in an SUV ten feet away, the doors open, the panels throbbing with rap.

  “Turn that down, please,” Chester said.

  A kid lowered the volume. “What was that?”

  “That music. It hurts my ears,” Chester said.

  “It grows on you,” the kid said. He turned the volume up full-blast.

  Chester walked to the door of the SUV. The three kids were looking at one another and grinning, as though they intuitively knew a lifelong object of ridicule had wandered into their midst and they were free to do anything they wished to him.

  “Why do you want to act smart-alecky?” Chester shouted above the roar.

  “You like Dilly Bars?” said the kid in the passenger seat. “Strap on your kneepads in the restroom. I’ll bring you one.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “My father owns half this town. Now get out of here, freak.”

  Chester rested one hand on the door like a lump of dough. “You shouldn’t say that to me.”

  “Oh, he’s all mad now,” the kid said, forming his mouth into a pout. “He messed himself. He’s starting to cry.”

  “He’s a retard,” the driver said. “Leave him alone.”

  “He’s cute,” said the kid in the passenger seat. “We like you, little buddy. Want to meet some girls?”

  “You’re very mean,” Chester said.

  “We’re finished here,” the driver said. He leaned toward the passenger window. “You hear me? Get your hand off the door.”

  When Chester didn’t move, the driver smashed his hand.

  “Owie,” Chester said.

  The three kids laughed.

  Chester got behind the wheel of his vehicle. He started the engine but could not hear its sound and had to rest his hand on the dashboard to make sure it was running. He had entered one of those soundproof moments in his life that belonged to neither the past nor the present. The catalyst and the consequence were always the same. Contempt, ridicule, public shame, followed by his eardrums swelling so tightly he couldn’t hear, and his optical nerves popping loose from the backs of his eyes, deconstructing the external world piece by piece.

  For perhaps thirty seconds, the backs of his eyelids were a red veil on the other side of which stick figures performed gross acts and fought one another with staves and staffs like the caricatures in tarot cards. It was funny how life replicated the tarot rather than the other way around. Maybe that was how thought worked. You had the thought, then the thought became the thing. That was why bad thoughts were to be avoided.

  The moment passed, and the world reassembled itself, and Chester drove into the street and down to the intersection. Ten minutes later, the three boys in the SUV pulled out and drove in the opposite direction. They stopped at a girl’s house, a filling station to gas up, a street corner in a black neighborhood to score some weed, a drive-through window for daiquiris, a gun-and-ammo store to buy .22 shells. They parked by a swampy woods used as an illegal dump and took turns pocking holes in a rusted-out car body that had no engine and no glass in the windows. When they were out of shells, they got back into the SUV and Bic-fired a bong.

  Chester estimated the range at eight hundred yards. With his gloves on, he loaded nine armor-piercing rounds into the box magazine, then wet the tenth round with his mouth and inserted it with the others. He braced the bipod on the car hood and sighted through the scope. Inside the SUV, the silhouettes of the boys moved back and forth like cutouts on a moving clothesline. He felt a flame lick at his loins, a hardening again in his manhood, a desire that went so deep he knew he would never satisfy it. His ears whirred with sound, his heart pounded, and just as he squeezed the trigger, he felt a dam break inside him and an orgasmic sensation flood through his body, so strong and warm and encompassing that his legs went weak.

  There was no movement inside the SUV, nor any sound. The round had punched a hole just below the rear window and probably gone through the seats and the radio. Chester kept the rifle aimed at the same level and delivered four more rounds, blowing pieces of the seats and upholstery and dashboard and windshield onto the hood.

  His last shot was into the gas tank. He picked up his brass and dropped it into the pockets of his baggy trousers. Before he pulled onto the asphalt, he glanced through the rear window. One of the kids had spilled onto the ground. One was running through the woods. Chester didn’t know where the third had gone. He turned up the air-conditioning until the inside of the car was frigid and the sweat on his face turned to ice. He thumbed a CD of Brahms into the stereo and took a deep breath through his nose, as though inhaling air off a glacier on the first day of creation, long before a thick-legged quadruped with fins and gills and lungs waddled out of the surf and began its agenda.

  HELEN CAME INTO my office on Tuesday morning. She had just gotten back from the sheriff’s department in St. Mary Parish. She told me of the shooting.

  “None of the boys were hit?” I said.

  “That’s what’s peculiar,” she said. “The shooter clustered five rounds below the rear window and put one in the gas tank. Why didn’t he riddle the whole vehicle if he was out to do maximum damage?”

  “How far away was he?”

  “Far enough that the boys never saw him. By the way, ‘boys’ isn’t a good term for these guys. They’re walking promotions for Planned Parenthood.”

  “No brass?”

  “Just tire tracks,” she said. “They may belong to a stolen car that was found in Des Allemands.”

  “You think this is our guy?” I asked.

  “He was obviously using a high-powered military rifle and probably firing armor-piercing rounds.”

  “The kids don’t have any idea who was shooting at them or why?”

  “They say a weirdo guy was yelling at them at the DQ.”

  “About what?”

  “Their radio was playing rap. That was a couple of hours before the shooting. I don’t think they were just playing rap, either.”

  “They wised off?”

  “Who knows? They’d drown in their own shit if they ever left St. Mary Parish,” she said.

  “What kind of car was the guy at the DQ driving?”

  “They just remembered it was green. Like the stolen one in Des Allemands.”

  “Any latents?”

  “The owner’s,” she said. “You think the shooter just wanted to scare the hell out of the
m?”

  “He parked one in the tank.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want them coming after him,” she said.

  “Or he wanted to burn them alive,” I said.

  “No, I think our boy lost control and went outside his parameters. Like somebody rolling the dice and shutting his eyes. Charlie Manson claims he never killed anyone. That’s because he got somebody else to do it.”

  I said earlier that Clete Purcel was the best investigative detective I ever knew—but Helen Soileau was a close second.

  “What did the guy at the DQ look like?” I asked.

  “Chubby buttocks. A lisp. The kind of guy who hangs around playgrounds.”

  “I think these kids have sexual problems of their own,” I said.

  “Before they got into it, they said the guy was smiling at everybody in the DQ, particularly at children.”

  “The kind of guy somebody might call Smiley?”

  “I think this baby is back in town and ready to rock,” she replied.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES IT IS hard to explain to outsiders the culture of southern Louisiana and the quandary of many of its people. The world in which they grew up is now a decaying memory, but many of them have no place in the present. I know Cajuns who have never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace. There are people here who cannot add and subtract, cannot read a newspaper, and do not know what the term “9/11” means. Over forty percent of children are born to an unwed mother. In terms of heart and kidney disease, infant mortality, fatal highway accidents, and contaminated drinking water, we are ranked among the worst in the nation. Our politicians are an embarrassment and give avarice and mendacity a bad name.

  So how do you get angry at someone who was born poor, speaks English so badly that she’s unintelligible to outsiders, has the worldview and religious beliefs of a medieval peasant, cleans houses for a living if she’s lucky, and is obese because of the fat-laced bulk food she feels thankful for?

  The temperature had hit ninety-eight degrees at four in the afternoon. The humidity was eye-watering and as bright as spun glass, as tangible as lines of insects crawling on your torso and thighs. At sunset, lightning pulsed in the clouds over the Gulf, but no rain fell, and the wind was dry and hot and smelled of road tar and diesel fuel. I walked down to the bayou and watched the sun shrink into an ember between two black clouds and disappear. Then the wind died and the trees stood still, and the surface of the bayou quivered in the sun’s afterglow, as though a molecular change were taking place in the water.

  It’s a phenomenon that seems unique to South Louisiana, like a sea change, as if the natural world is reversing itself and correcting an oversight. The barometer will drop unexpectedly, the bayou will swell and remain placid at the same time, and suddenly, rain rings will dimple the surface from one bank to the other. Fish sense the change in barometric pressure and begin feeding on the surface in anticipation of the rain that will wash food from the trees into the stream or swamp.

  The wind sprang to life just as a solitary raindrop struck my face. I went back into the house to get Alafair. “Come outside.”

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “It’s actually raining. Let’s walk down to Clementine’s for dessert.”

  She was writing in longhand at her worktable, a flat-sided oak door I had nailed onto sawhorses. She looked out the window. The light was almost gone, and leaves were scattering across the yard, and Mon Tee Coon was standing stiff-legged on top of Tripod’s hutch, his nose pointed into the wind. “Wonderful,” Alafair said, and capped her pen.

  As we stepped out onto the gallery, we saw a short, stocky woman in a dark dress walk at an angle across Main, carrying a hand-lettered sign, undaunted by the whir of the automobile tires whizzing past her. Her shoulders were humped, the muscles in her calves shaped like upside-down bowling pins, her expression as angry as an uprooted rock. The sign read “D. Robicheaux killed my husbon and was let free. How my family going to live?”

  “Let me talk to her, Dave,” Alafair said.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  My expression of confidence was vanity. There in the dying light, trapped in her own rage and madness and the heat radiating through the soles of her cheap shoes, her hair tangled wetly on her face, raindrops spinning down from the stars above oak trees planted by slaves, dredged out of a sixteenth-century mob armed with pitchforks and rakes, Mrs. T. J. Dartez had persevered through time and history and the elements and brought her war to my doorstep and, worse, confronted me again with the bête noire I could not exorcize from my life. I tried to place my hand on her arm.

  “Don’t touch me, you,” she said. “Liar. Killer. Fite putin.”

  “Don’t be talking about my mother, Ms. Dartez,” I said.

  “I seen the preacher at our church. He said I got to forgive. ‘Not Detective Robicheaux, I don’t.’ That’s what I tole him, yeah. Ain’t nothing in the Bible say we got to forgive evil. And that’s what you are.”

  “I didn’t kill your husband.”

  “How you know that if you say you was so drunk you didn’t know what world you was in. My man was sick. He didn’t have no money for his prescriptions. He couldn’t protect hisself.”

  “What prescriptions?”

  “For his epilepsy. His truck was ruint, and he couldn’t work ’cause of the accident and ’cause the insurance company wouldn’t give him no money.”

  “That’s not true, Ms. Dartez,” Alafair said.

  “You stay out of it, you.”

  “Let us drive you home,” I said.

  “I ain’t taking no favors from y’all. God gonna get you, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m gonna stay out here all night. Then I’m gonna stay out here all day tomorrow.”

  “No, you will not,” I said.

  “You ain’t gonna boss me, no.”

  “I wouldn’t try to do that,” I said. “I think you’re a good lady, Ms. Dartez. I think someone used your husband to bring me harm.”

  “It was you,” she said. “It’s all been you.”

  “No, ma’am, it’s not me,” I said.

  A raindrop struck her forehead and ran through one eyebrow and across her nose like silver thread. But she never blinked, and she did not try to wipe the water from her face. “Why you done this to me? I ain’t got nothing except two hungry kids, me.”

  I put a hand on each of her shoulders, whether she liked it or not. “My wife Annie was murdered. So was my mother. My father was killed by an oil-well blowout that shouldn’t have happened. I know what it feels like to be treated badly by the world. That is why I would never deliberately hurt you or your husband. Look into my face and tell me I’m lying.”

  “I ain’t got to do nothing you say.”

  “No, you don’t. But what does your conscience tell you? Forget about the preacher at your church, good man that he might be; forget about me; forget about every other person in the world except you and your children and your own idea of God. What does your conscience tell you?”

  She faltered. “I ain’t sho’.”

  “No, tell me, Ms. Dartez. Tell me now.” I squeezed her shoulders tighter. Tears were welling in her eyes. She shook her head.

  “Say it.”

  “You’re telling the troot’.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She dropped the sign on the grass. “What am I gonna do, suh?”

  “Whatever it is, Alafair and I will help you with it.”

  She buried her face into my chest, her hands at her sides. I could feel the wetness coming through my shirt.

  “I’ll be inside,” Alafair said.

  “You okay, Ms. Dartez?” I said.

  “No, suh, I ain’t. I ain’t never gonna be okay. Never, never, never.” She ground her forehead deeper into my chest, into the bone.

  Considering the hand she’d been dealt, who would take her to task?

  * * *

  AT NOON ON Wednesday, Clete was about to go across the street
to Victor’s Cafeteria when a midnight-blue Buick with tinted windows pulled to the curb and a chauffeur in gray livery got out and looked across the roof at Clete and said, “Got a minute, Mr. Purcel?”

  Peroxide hair, dented-in face, shades, flat stomach, concrete deltoids, scar tissue around the eyes, a half cup of brains. Where had he seen him before?

  “You’re Swede Jensen. You parked cars at the casino.”

  “You got a good memory,” the chauffeur said. “I work for Ms. Nightingale now.”

  “I’m closed till one.”

  “She gave me orders. I told her you probably didn’t want to be bothered. She pissed in the swimming pool about it. How about cutting me a break?”

  Clete tried to process what he’d just heard. It was impossible. “Come in and make it fast.” He went back into the office and closed the blinds. His secretary had already gone to lunch; the waiting area was empty. He sat behind his desk and opened a drawer and took out a roll of mints and put one into his mouth. He left the drawer open. A .25-caliber semi-auto lay under a notepad. Swede took a chair.

  “She wants to hire you,” he said.

  “So why doesn’t she come in?”

  “She’s shy.”

  “I’ll believe that in a minute.”

  “I told her we go back.”

  “We don’t go back, Swede. I remember you. That’s a long way from ‘we go back.’ ”

  “This is my meal ticket, Purcel.”

  “Before Tony Nine Ball got you a job parking cars, you were a porn actor in that studio out on Airline Highway.”

  Swede took off his shades and pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes were blue, one of them defective, as if there were an ice chip in the lens. “I took a pinch for a lewd act with a minor. I had to wait eight months in jail to go to court. The charges got dropped. You want me to leave, that’s fine with me.”