James Burke - Robicheaux

“A pimp and a meth dealer. He says he’s delivered dope and women to your house.”

“Grand. Anything else?”

“He says he makes deposits in a bank account used by your company. He operates around the Jennings area.”

“Let’s go inside. I have some aspirin in the kitchen. How about a cold washcloth on the forehead?”

“None of this is true?”

He walked ahead of me, looking over his shoulder. “It’s good I like you.”

“I don’t think you get it, Jimmy. This isn’t a courtesy call.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a visitation by a lunatic.”

I caught up with him and slipped my hand under his arm. I turned him around. He seemed surprised.

“Lose the attitude, Jimmy,” I said.

He looked down at my hand. “All right, I will. My attitude is one of kindness to you. I respect your service to the country and your service to the community. You’ve been through perfect misery in the last two years. That isn’t lost on me or others. Learn who your bloody friends are, Dave.”

“Been hanging with the Aussies?”

“That’s a cheap shot.”

“Tony Nemo says you shafted him.”

“Tony has a fried egg for a brain.”

“I think Levon Broussard is a decent and honorable man,” I said. “I also think he’s naive. Nobody is going to use me to hurt him.”

Jimmy put his hands on his hips and looked at the bayou, his face cool and handsome and at peace. “I don’t know what to say. Come have a cold drink with me. Please.”

“This guy Penny is lying?”

“Regarding me, he is. I never heard of the guy.”

I looked him in the face.

“As God is my witness,” he added.

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“I accept your word.”

“There you go,” he said, and hit me on the back.

We walked up the slope into his backyard, past a gazebo and camellia bushes in full bloom and trellises dripping with roses and wisteria, the St. Augustine grass so thick and dark green and cold and stiff in the shade that it looked and felt like artificial turf.

A woman opened the back door. She wore a black suit and hose; her hair was black, too, pulled straight back, her skin the color of paste, her eyes dark and luminous, as though she had a fever. “I’m Emmeline.”

“How do you do, Miss Emmeline? I’m Dave Robicheaux.”

“Did you have engine trouble again?” she said to Jimmy.

“Wasn’t watching the fuel gauge, I’m afraid. Nothing to be worried about. With pontoons, you can land almost anywhere in Louisiana. What did our local congressman say? ‘Half the state is underwater, the other half under indictment.’ ”

“Would you like a highball or a glass of wine, Detective Robicheaux?”

“No, thank you.”

“On the clock, are you?”

“Yes, I must be going. It’s nice meeting you in person.”

She didn’t reply, as though I hadn’t spoken. The wind picked up, sprinkling leaves that were as hard as the shells of crustaceans on the grass. It was cold in the shade, the light on the four-o’clocks and caladiums harsh and brittle. We were in the midst of spring, yet I felt a sense of mortality I couldn’t explain.

Her face was impossible to read. She was one of those women who seemed to choose solitude and plainness over beauty, and anger over happiness.

“You ever meet a guy named Kevin Penny?” I said.

“Our convict gardener?” she replied. “I fired him.”

I looked at Jimmy. He shrugged and turned up his palms. “I don’t know the name of every guy who cuts the grass, Dave.”

“What is this about?” Emmeline said.

“Veracity,” I said.

“I don’t care for your tone,” she said.

“I don’t blame you. It bothers me, too.” I pointed my finger at Jimmy Nightingale. “I think you’re slick.”

“I’m dishonest?”

“Take it any way you want.”

“You’ve got some damn nerve,” he said.

“Tell it to the eight murdered women in Jeff Davis Parish,” I replied.

“What do they have to do with me?”

“I heard you hung around Bobby Earl because you wanted his mailing list. I never believed that,” I said.

“It’s politics. This is Louisiana.”

“I remember many situations when I said it was just Vietnam.”

Jimmy pulled the cork from a green half-empty bottle of wine. “Here’s to neocolonialism everywhere.”

I wasn’t up to his cynicism. I looked at the oaks, the moss lifting in the wind, purple dust rising from a cane field, Bayou Teche glinting in the sun like a Byzantine shield. La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die, the place for which there was no answer or cure.

I said nothing more and walked to my vehicle, rude or not.

Recovering alcoholics have ways of setting themselves up. Some get the toxins out of their system and stop attending meetings. Maybe they hang with the old crowd. They drop by a saloon to watch a football game on a Saturday afternoon. They convince themselves their problems had to do with excess rather than compulsion and metabolic addiction and a deep-seated neurosis armor-plated in the unconscious. Or they nurse resentment and fuel their anger on a daily basis, like a primitive fur-clad creature methodically dropping sticks into a fire.

Or maybe they want to cancel their whole ticket but are afraid to lose their soul. If they’re in this category, they’ll commit suicide in an incremental fashion, one glass or bottle at a time. And if the process isn’t fast enough, they will put themselves in dangerous situations involving guns and knives and people who belong in steel cages.

I went to a meeting at the Episcopalian cottage on Center Street, across from old New Iberia High. When the moderator asked if anyone was attending A.A. for the first time, or if anyone was returning from a slip and wanted a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, I let my face go empty and stared at the floor in the semidarkness. At the end of the meeting, I said little or nothing to friends with whom I had been in the program for years, and drove to my house in a heavy white fog that had moved in from the Gulf, and parked my truck in the porte cochere and went inside and sat in the living room in the dark, the television off, the silence as loud as a scream.

The operative acronym for every A.A. member is HALT, which means don’t get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. I was all of those. I called Clete’s cell phone, which went immediately to voicemail. I didn’t want the food in my icebox. I woke lifeless and exhausted with every sunrise. My hands opened and closed at my sides for no reason. I deliberately revisited memories of a human face dissolving in a bloody mist when I squeezed off round after round from my army-issue 1911-model .45.

I’m not proud of any of these things. I hated them then; I hate them now. But they live in me like a snake that slowly swallows its prey, compressing it into a canister of despair and pain.

I went into the kitchen and filled a large glass with tap water and drank it to the bottom. In the darkness I heard the claws of an animal scratching at the screen. I set the glass quietly in the sink and went through the mudroom and opened the screen door. A raccoon that must have weighted twenty-five pounds jumped from the windowsill and thumped on the ground, then scampered through the leaves past Tripod’s old hutch and disappeared inside the fog.

I walked down the slope, looking for him. The air was cold, the fog hanging in huge clouds on the bayou and in the trees. I heard a splash, like a gator slapping its tail. I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it on the ground. The tracks of a raccoon and probably a possum or an armadillo were stenciled along the mudflat. The tracks disappeared into the cattails. Farther down, inside clouds of fog that rose four feet above the water, I heard a soft knocking sound, like a friend at the door in the early hours. I shined the light ahead of me. The tide was coming in, and an unmoored pirogue had floated up the bayou and lodged against a decayed and collapsed dock at the foot of my property.