James Burke: Robicheaux

I retrieved my lure and started the engine and drove back to the levee, the bow scraping on the concrete ramp like fingernails on a blackboard. I stopped into a bait shop and ate a sandwich on the gallery and watched the last of the sun slip beyond the trees. Several men were drinking beer at a spool table next to me. I believed I knew one of them, but I couldn’t say for sure. They invited me to join them. I could not get my mind off Molly, her warmth and steadfastness as a companion, her ability to deal with the sorrow and suffering of the world and not be undone by it.

“Everything cool, buddy?” a man said.

“Sure. I look like my gyroscope is busted?” I replied.

“Have a brew.”

“I have to be on my way.”

“I should, too,” he said. “My old lady is going to throw my supper in the backyard. Is yours like that?”

The sun was only an ember when I drove down the levee. A few minutes later, I was on the two-lane highway outside Breaux Bridge, the sky dark with rainclouds, when a pickup truck got on the back of my trailer and the driver clicked on his high beams, flooding the inside of my truck with light. I tried to see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror, but his headlights were blinding. I touched my brake pedal to no avail. I had broken the clamp-on emergency flasher I’d carried in my truck only two days earlier. There were ditches on either side of the road and no shoulder where I could pull off. My eyes were watering from the glare in the mirror.

Like anyone who has been harassed on the road by a tailgater, I felt my anger begin to rise, slowly at first, then build into an emotional straitjacket, and I began to have thoughts I did not associate with who I was. I pressed the brake again, this time hard. But he didn’t back off. His headlights were so close they were beneath the level of my trailer. I accelerated. He dropped back a few feet in the mirror, and I saw a pipe bumper welded on the front of his vehicle. Then he came at me again. As I neared the convenience store at the intersection, he roared through the blinking red light and shot me the finger.

The truck was pale blue, one side gnarled with dents, one taillight broken. I saw the driver for only seconds. His hair was black, his face unshaved; he looked like thousands of Cajun men.

I drove home, my wrists throbbing. Clete was sitting on the steps, tossing acorns at nothing, a fedora slanted on his brow.

I pulled my trailer around his Caddy and parked it on the grass. The leaves crackled under my feet as I crossed the yard. He sniffed.

“You have a cold?” I asked.

“I smell beer.”

“I was sitting next to some guys at a bait shop.”

His eyes searched my face. I looked away, down the street. The streetlamps were on, rain dripping from the oaks. The sidewalk was arched in the places where the oak roots had broken through the concrete. The only sound was the whir of automobile tires on the street.

“I told Nightingale to stick his deal,” Clete said.

“You’re not going to work it out with him?”

“You don’t work out things with a guy like Nightingale. You park one in his ear.”

“When did you get this bright idea?”

“Last night. I couldn’t sleep. I felt dirty all over.”

“What are you going to do, Clete?”

“Nig and Wee Willie will front me a hundred thousand.”

“At what interest rate?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“How much do you owe?”

“Altogether, with loans all over the city and back interest and my maxed-out credit cards and the vigorish and principle with the shylocks, close to two hundred and fifty thou.”

“How’d you do this, Clete?”

“Why don’t you try to make me feel bad?”

I sat down next to him. “I’ll get a loan on the house.”

“Not for me, you won’t.”

“I’ll do it whether you like it or not.”

He shook his head, his hands between his knees. “What can they do?”

“You know what they can do.”

“I’ll go out smoking.”

“Why did you change your mind about Nightingale’s offer?”

“This skip I had to pick up in Jennings is a pimp and meth dealer. His name is Kevin Penny. Ever hear of him?”

“No.”

“This is the third time I’ve had to go after him. I almost capped him once. In custody. His little boy told the welfare worker what Penny did to him. I knew what he was going to do to his kid when he made the street.” He stopped and tapped his fists up and down on his thighs.

“What is it?” I said.

“I’m not being honest. Earlier, Penny told me about what a sleaze Nightingale was. You think Nightingale is a gentleman or something, but I know better. Nonetheless, I was going to take the deal with him. I didn’t want to lose my place in the Quarter. Whatever principles I have, I was willing to sell them out.”

“So what did this guy Penny tell you?”

“He delivered coke to Nightingale’s house. And a girl or two.”

“Every one of these guys has a story like that. They’ve sold dope to George W. Bush or set up trysts for John Kennedy. Don’t buy into this crap, Clete.”

“Penny says he’s deposited money in a bank account of a company owned by Nightingale. He was even taught how to structure it. To make the deposits in amounts of less than ten thousand so the bank doesn’t report it to the IRS.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Those eight women who were killed,” Clete said. “They haunt me.”

He wasn’t alone. I had worked with a task force on some of those homicides in Jeff Davis Parish. Eight young women, all of them poor, all of them involved with drugs and prostitution, were found with their throats cut, or so badly decomposed in a swamp that the cause of death couldn’t be determined. At the same time, there was a series of kidnappings and murders in East and West Baton Rouge parishes. Those victims were also dumped in wetlands areas. We thought we had the killers. In fact, Clete and I helped take them off the board.

We were wrong. The murders in Jeff Davis Parish came out of a culture that many Americans would not be able to understand, an aggregate of corrupt cops, ignorance, greed, misogyny, cruelty, sexual degradation, drug addiction, and ultimately, collective indifference toward the fate of people who have neither power nor voice. I’m talking about a new social class, one that is not racially defined. They come out of the womb addicted to crack and booze, have only a semblance of a family, drift from town to town selling themselves or dealing dope or stealing to buy it. The irony is they’re not criminals, not in the traditional sense. They’re pitiful, sad, and vulnerable, gathered up in bus stations like grunion at high tide.

“Have you eaten?” I said.

“My stomach’s not right,” Clete said.

“Come inside.”

“Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you back on the sauce?”

“I have some potato salad and cold chicken inside.”

“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said.

I walked ahead of him into the kitchen and clicked on the light. I thought I saw a raccoon on the window ledge, staring through the screen. When I looked outside, the yard was empty and windswept, tormented by shadows.

Early the next morning I got a call I didn’t expect.

“Is that you, Robicheaux?”

“Who’s calling?” I said.

“How many people got pustules in their throat and sound like a rusty sewer pipe?”

“Tony?”

“Tell the maid to give you a blow job.”

“How did you get this number?”

“It cost me a dollar ninety-five on the Internet. I think I got fucked. Speaking of which, you put a posthole digger up my ass.”

“In what way?”

“Jimmy Nightingale said he was gonna get that Civil War sword appraised. Now he tells me he gave it to Levon Broussard, but he’ll give me ten thousand reimbursement. I told him to change his ten grand into nickels and shove them up his nose. Why’d you do this to me?”