James Burke - Robicheaux

“Let’s back up a little bit,” Clete said. “Jimmy Nightingale told Dave he didn’t know you.”

“He’s a liar.”

“That’s what I thought,” Clete said. “I told Dave you were no yardman, either.”

“I was the chauffeur.”

“You delivered dope and girls to Nightingale’s house?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to answer that question? To a cop? What’s with all this Nightingale stuff?”

“The Jeff Davis Eight,” I said.

“Oh, boohoo time again,” he said. “Those whores got themselves killed.”

“How do you figure that?” I said.

“They’re skanks. They’re stupid. They go out on their own. Independence and the word ‘whore’ don’t go together.”

“They need a pimp?” I said.

“No, they need plastic surgery. Why you keep looking at me like that?”

“You’re an interesting guy.”

“What’s with this guy, Purcel?”

“Dave is all right, Kev.”

“Yeah? This stuff about the cousin? She ain’t Jimmy’s cousin. She’s his sister or half sister.”

“Let’s stick to the subject,” I said. “In your opinion, who killed the eight women?”

“They were in the life, man.”

“Why’d Jimmy’s secretary fire you?” I said.

“She came on to me. I told Jimmy. Who cares about any of this?”

There was a dull intensity in his eyes that’s hard to describe or account for. You see it in recidivists or in lockdown units where the criminally insane are kept, although you are never sure they are actually insane.

“I like your accent,” I said. “Did you grow up in New Orleans?”

“I’m from New York.”

“Want to give us the name of the company bank account you were using as a drop?” I said.

But I had lost his attention. “What you got in your slacks, Purcel? A blackjack? You’re shitting me?”

“I always carry one. Take it easy.”

“I’m done talking. I’m gonna finish my dinner.”

“You see Tony Squid around?” Clete asked.

“At the aquarium.”

“Is Tony doing more than pour concrete for Jimmy Nightingale?” Clete said.

Penny kicked open the door, letting in the rain. “Youse both get out.”

“Clete told me you had a son,” I said.

I saw the alarm in Clete’s face.

“What about him?” Penny said.

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing. He went to a home.”

“For irreparably damaged children?” I said.

He pared his thumbnail with the tine of a fork, then raised his eyes to mine. His lips curled as though he were preparing to speak, but he didn’t utter a word. Somehow I felt I was gazing into the face of an old enemy.

Clete and I went down the wood steps into the rain. Clete looked back over his shoulder. He took a breath. “He’s got a hard-on for you, Dave. If you come out here again, carry a drop.”

“He’ll cap a cop he’s met one time?”

“He’s got a brain like flypaper. He doesn’t let go.”

“I feel like going back in there.”

“Let’s have a burger and some coffee. Don’t argue.”

“What’d he do to his son?”

“The kid is too scared to talk. Penny is supposed to get him back in two weeks.”

He started the Caddy. We drove slowly past the trailer and the pond blanketed with floating trash.

The next morning, my first visitor in the office was Spade Labiche. He looked energized, glowing with his new assignment, a notepad in his hand. “Got a second, Dave?”

“What’s up?”

He sat down without being asked and peeled back his notebook. “I want you to know everything I’m doing. Maybe you can explain a couple of things as we go along.”

“Okay.”

“We pulled the phone records for calls made to the Dartez number night before last. None were made from your cell or your landline. Except one came in from a pay phone at a filling station in St. Martinville. At just about the time Ms. Dartez says her husband talked to you and said he’d meet you out by Bayou Benoit.”

I didn’t reply.

“You had a snootful?” he said.

“Who told you that?”

“Helen has to do her job, Robo.”

“Yeah, I was loaded.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, writing in his notebook. “So you were going to iron some things out with Dartez? About your wife’s death?”

“I don’t remember.”

He looked up at me. “Can you give me something to work with here?”

“So you can exclude me?”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“Do you have any witnesses?”

“I’m not supposed to discuss that. We’ve got to tow your truck in. Are you solid with that?”

“What for?”

“An anonymous tipster said he saw a beat-up blue truck slam the rear end of a black truck close to the convenience store. You told Helen you were headed to St. Martinville. So we got to have a look at your truck, Robo.”

“I don’t know who gave you permission to give me a nickname, but I advise you to stop using it.”

“Ease up on the batter, bubba.”

“Get out of my office.”

He flipped the notebook shut. “Have it your way.”

“I plan to.”

But I was all rhetoric. The truth is, the backs of my legs were shaking.

The electric tiger caught up with me at eleven Saturday night. That’s what I used to call the heebie-jeebies. I first got them in Vietnam, along with the malaria I picked up in the Philippines. I came home with a hole in my chest and a punji scar like a flattened worm on my stomach and shrapnel in my hip and thigh that set off alarms when I went through metal sensors. The real damage I carried was one nobody saw. I’d hear the tiger padding around the house at three or four in the morning, then he’d sniff his way into the bedroom, glowing so brightly that the air would glisten and warp and my eyes would sting.

The strange phenomenon about alcoholic abstinence is that while you’re laying off the hooch and working the program, your disease is doing push-ups and waiting for the day you slip. You can ease back into the dirty boogie or hit the floor running, but I promise you, the electric tiger, or your version of it, will come back with a roar.

My truck was in the pound, but I had a rental parked in the driveway. I drove to a liquor store in Lafayette and bought a pint of vodka, a bottle of Collins mix, a jar of cherries, a plastic cup, a small bag of crushed ice, and drove into Girard Park, next to the University of Louisiana campus, and got serious. The vodka went down cold and warm and sweet and hard as ice, all at the same time. When I closed my eyes, a lantern lit up the inside of my head, as if I had punched a hypodermic loaded with morphine into my arm.

It was an easy slide into the basement. The things I did next were not done in a blackout. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had put a sawed-off pool cue on the backseat before I left home, one that was weighted heavily at the base. I started the engine and got on I-10 and headed west, the speedometer maxed out.

Maybe Penny was sleeping one off. It’s hard to say. I knotted a bandana around my face and set fire to the shed with the dirt bike in it, and tapped on the door and waited by the rear of the trailer. There was no reaction inside. A raincloud burst directly overhead, and the fire went out. I smashed on the door with my fist and was standing directly in front of it when Penny jerked it open.

“What’s the haps?” I said, swinging the pool cue at a forty-five-degree angle across his face.

He stumbled backward, a hand pressed against one eye and the other eye bulging, so his face looked like it had been sawed down the middle. “Who the—”

I stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and caught him with the weighted end of the cue on the ear. He crashed on the breakfast table, his mouth wide with either pain or surprise. I swung the cue on his neck and back and spine as though I were chopping wood. When he tried to stand, I shoved him onto the floor of the toilet cubicle. He was wearing only his socks and Jockey shorts. Blood was leaking from his ear. “Why you doing this? Who the fuck are you, man?”