James Burke: Robicheaux

“I did some Googling,” Tony said. “The guy who owned this was from New Iberia. It’s worth a lot more than two or three thousand dollars, right? Maybe the guy was famous for something.”

“You couldn’t find any of that on the Internet, with all the Civil War junk that’s on sale?”

“You can’t trust the Internet. It’s full of crazoids.”

I couldn’t begin to sort through the contradictions in what he had just said. This was a typical Fat Tony conversation. Trying to get inside his mind was akin to submerging your hand in an unflushed toilet. Outside, some black kids were breaking bottles with an air rifle in a vacant lot. There were concrete foundations in the lot without structures on them. A garbage truck was driving down a street, seagulls picking at its overflow.

“Is this about Clete?” I said.

“I got no problem with Purcel. Other people do. It’s true he took out that fat dick of his at the Southern Yacht Club and hosed down Bobby Earl’s car?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Two weeks ago he did it again. At the casino.”

“Clete did?”

“No, the pope. Earl put his lady friend in the car, and suddenly, she’s sitting in a puddle of piss.”

“Why did you show me this sword, Tony?”

“Because the family of the guy who owned it lives in New Iberia. I thought maybe they’d want it.”

“What does any of this have to do with Clete and Bobby Earl?”

“Nothing.”

My head was throbbing. “It was good seeing you.”

“Sit down. I know what happened with your wife. No witnesses except the guy who killed her. He says she ran the Stop sign. They had to cut her out with the Jaws of Life?”

I could feel blood veins tightening on the side of my head.

“She died on the way to the hospital and got blamed for her own death?” he said.

“Who told you this?”

“Some cops. You got a dirty deal. Something ought to be done.”

“You need to disengage, Tony.”

“On top of it, I heard the guy tried to pump the insurance company. Shut the door.”

I leaned forward. “Listen carefully, Tony. My wife’s death is my business. You stay out of it.”

“Mabel, shut the door!” he yelled at his secretary. I raised my finger at him. I was trembling. I heard the door click shut behind me. He spoke before I could. “Hear me out. The guy ran over a kid in a school zone in Alabama. The kid was crippled for life. You give me the nod, this guy is gonna be crawling around on stumps.”

“When did he run over a child in a school zone?”

“Ten, fifteen years back.”

“Where in Alabama?”

“What difference does it make? I’m telling you like it is. A guy like that has got it coming.”

He was like every gangster I ever knew. They’re self-righteous and marginalize their victims before breaking their bones. Not one of them could think his way out of a wet paper bag. Their level of cruelty is equaled only by the level of disingenuousness that governs their lives.

“I want you to get this straight, Tony. Go near the man who hit my wife’s car, and I’ll come looking for you, up close and personal.”

“Yeah?” He lit a cigarette with a paper match, cupping the flame. He threw the burnt match into the wastebasket. “So fuck me.”

I stood up and pulled the sword halfway from its scabbard, then slid it inside again. The guard was brass, molded like a metal basket with slits in it. It was incised with the names of three battles that took place during Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign, plus Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg, and extended protectively and cuplike over the back of my hand. The black leather on the grip was both soft and firm, wrapped with gold wire. I replaced the sword on Tony’s desk. “I think the Broussard family would be honored and delighted if you gave this to them.”

“I’m having a hard time processing this,” he said. “I try to be your friend, and you’re offended and make threats. If you were somebody else, we’d have a different outcome here.”

“So fuck both of us. Tell me something, Tony.”

“What? How you should get rid of terminal assholitis?”

“Why do you keep your office in a neighborhood like this?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It looks like a moonscape. In the next storm, it’s going underwater again.”

“I like to stay close to the people. On that subject, I’m backing a guy who might end up president of the United States. Want to know who that is?”

“Not really.”

“Jimmy Nightingale. People have been talking political correctness in this country for too many years. There’s gonna be a change. Fucking A.”

“Somehow I believe you, Tony.”

And that was probably the most depressing thought I’d had in a long time.

I parked my pickup on Decatur and walked across Jackson Square, past Pirate’s Alley and St. Louis Cathedral and a marimba band playing in the shade by the bookstore that used to be William Faulkner’s apartment. The day was bright and windy, cool even for March, the flowerpots on the balconies bursting with color, the kind of day in Louisiana that lifts the heart and tells you perhaps spring is forever, that the long rainy weeks of winter were nothing more than a passing aberration, that even death can be stilled by the season if you’ll only believe.

Clete’s apartment and PI office were located in a grand old building on St. Ann Street, the plaster painted a pale yellow, the ironwork on the balcony dripping with bougainvillea and bugle vine, a dry wishing well in the courtyard. Other than the vintage Cadillacs he drove, the only material possession he ever loved was his building, which may have been owned in the nineteenth century by the same woman who ran the House of the Rising Sun.

When I rounded the corner, I saw not only the building but a moving van at the curb and half of Clete’s furniture and office equipment on the sidewalk. Clete was on the sidewalk, arguing with a notorious New Orleans character named Whitey Zeroski, known as the dumbest white person in the city. When he was an independent taxi driver, he thought he’d widen his horizons and run for city council. He outfitted a pickup truck with loudspeakers and a huge sign on the roof and on Saturday night drove into a black neighborhood, blaring to the crowds on the sidewalks, “Vote for Whitey! Whitey is your friend! Don’t forget Whitey on Tuesday! Whitey will never let you down!”

He was stunned by the cascade of rocks, bricks, bottles, and beer cans that crashed on top of his vehicle.

I hadn’t seen Clete in weeks, and I missed him, as I always did when we were separated for very long. Oddly, in the last couple of years, Clete had imposed a degree of order upon his life. The scars he carried from an abusive home in the old Irish Channel and Vietnam and the romances that began passionately but always ended badly no longer seemed to be his burden. He didn’t drink before noon, laid off the weed and cigarettes, ate one po’boy sandwich for lunch instead of two, and clanked iron in a baggy pair of Everlasts in his courtyard and sometimes jogged from one end of the Quarter to the other. When he’d head down Bourbon, one of the black kids who tap-danced for the tourists would sometimes say, “Here come the pink elephant. Hope he don’t crack the cement.”

None of this stopped me from worrying about Clete and his swollen liver and his blood pressure, and the violence he inflicted upon others as surrogates for himself and for the father who had beaten him unmercifully with a razor strop. I loved Clete Purcel, and I didn’t care who knew it or what others might think of us. We started off our careers walking a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, fresh back from Indochina, the evening sky robin’s-egg blue, the clouds as pink as cotton candy and ribbed like piano keys arching over the city. We thought we’d hit the perfecta. The Quarter was alive with music and full of beautiful women and the smell of burgundy and tap beer and bruised mint in a glass of shaved ice and Jack Daniel’s. Could the world offer any finer gifts?