James Burke: Robicheaux

“Cletus, try to get to the point,” I said.

“Legal problem? She got busted for leaving her kid in a hot car while she was stoned and balling a couple of truck drivers in a motel room. She skipped on her court appearance and left the bondsman on the hook for ten grand. So I pass the dice, and slap Bobby Earl on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth, and say, ‘Hey, Bob, I hear you picked up another nail. If you’re on penicillin, you shouldn’t be drinking. Next time out, wear a hazmat suit or get some radioactive condoms for your flopper.’ ”

He was sitting at the breakfast table now. He yawned as though just waking up, and put two fingers into his shirt pocket for cigarettes that weren’t there. Then he blinked.

“What’s the rest of it?” I said.

“Nothing. I left. I saw Earl’s wheels. I used my slim-jim to pop his door and took a leak inside.”

“No, you’ve left something out.”

“Like what?”

“Why give Bobby Earl a hard time? Like you said, he’s pitiful.”

“He makes me ashamed I’m from New Orleans. He’s a disgrace to the city. He’s a disgrace to the planet.”

“Does Jimmy Nightingale figure in this?”

“I might have said one or two things I shouldn’t have.”

“Really?”

“He put his arm on my shoulders like we were old pals. Then he touched my cheek with the back of his wrist. Yuck. I called him a cunt and got escorted in cuffs out the front door. There were only about three or four hundred people watching.”

He cleared his throat softly, his eyes shiny.

“He’s lucky you didn’t drop him,” I said. “Those security guys, too.”

“Think so?”

“I’m proud of you, Clete.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me guiltily.

“What?” I said.

“Nightingale is part owner of the company I took the reverse mortgage from.”

Jimmy Nightingale was one of the most unusual men I ever knew. He grew up in Franklin, on Bayou Teche, and lived in a refurbished antebellum home that resembled a candlelit steamboat couched among the live oaks. Like his family, Jimmy was a patrician and an elitist, but among common people, he was kind and humble and an attentive listener when they spoke of their difficulties and travail and Friday-night football games and the items they bought at Walmart. If someone told a vulgar joke or used profanity in his presence, he pretended not to hear or he walked away, but he never indicated condemnation. In a dressing room or a pickup basketball game, his manners and smile were so disarming that it was easy to think of him as an avatar of noblesse oblige rather than the personification of greed for which the Nightingales were infamous.

Please don’t misunderstand. My description of Jimmy is not about him or the system he served but a weakness in me. In trying to be a halfway decent Christian, I put aside my resentment of his oligarchic background and accepted him as he was. Actually, it went further than that. I liked Jimmy a lot, or at least I liked things about him. I admired him and perhaps sometimes even envied his combination of composure and ardor, as well as his ability to float above the pettiness that characterizes the greater part of our lives.

He was handsome in an androgynous way, his hair bronze-colored and neatly clipped and perfectly combed, his face egg-shaped, his cheeks pooled with color, his breath sweet. Both men and women were drawn to him in a physical way, and I think many times his admirers could not explain the attraction. He probably wasn’t over five-nine and 150 pounds. But maybe that was the key to his likability. He was one of us, yet confident in a locker room or at a boxing match, and he didn’t feel a need to contend with criticism or personal insult. Jimmy used to say the only argument you ever win is the one you don’t have.

He was our man of all seasons: a graduate of military school, a screenwriter, a yachtsman, a polo player, and a performer at aerial shows. He could speak on any subject and was the escort of women who were both beautiful and cerebral, although he had never married nor, to my knowledge, ever been engaged. His self-contained manner and repressed intensity made me wonder if he didn’t belong in a Greek tragedy.

I believed Jimmy had an enormous capacity for either good or evil, and that his spirit was as capricious as a wind vane. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said no one could understand America without understanding the graves of Shiloh. I think the same could have been said of Jimmy Nightingale.

He was about to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate. If elected, he would establish a precedent. Yes, Louisiana has produced some statesmen and stateswomen, but they are the exception and not the norm. For many years our state legislature has been known as a mental asylum run by ExxonMobil. Since Huey Long, demagoguery has been a given; misogamy and racism and homophobia have become religious virtues, and self-congratulatory ignorance has become a source of pride.

I shared none of these thoughts with Clete. Instead, when I returned to New Iberia and my shotgun house on the bayou a short distance from the Shadows, I called Jimmy Nightingale’s home in Franklin. A female secretary answered and took a message. Did you ever have a conversation with a professional ice cube?

“Do you know where Mr. Nightingale is?” I asked.

“He didn’t say.”

“Is he in New Orleans?”

“I’m sure he’ll return your call very soon, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“It’s Detective Robicheaux.”

“Thank you for your call, Detective Robicheaux. Is your call in reference to an official matter?”

“I really don’t know how to define it.”

“I’ll tell him that. Good-bye.”

The line went dead.

I lit the gas stove in the kitchen and warmed a bowl of frozen crawfish gumbo. The windows were open, the curtains swelling with wind, the house creaking. The light was failing in the oak and pecan trees in my backyard. On the far side of the bayou, a man of color was sitting on a wooden chair, fishing with a cane pole and bobber among the reeds, the late sun splintering on the water. Since my wife’s accident, this had become my worst time of day. My home was cavernous with silence and emptiness. My wife was gone, and so were my pets and most of my relatives. With each day that passed, I felt as though the world I had known was being airbrushed out of a painting.

I took the gumbo off the stove and sat down at the breakfast table with a spoon and a chunk of dry French bread and started to eat. I heard a car turn in to my gravel drive, the tires clicking, and come to a stop at the porte cochere.

“Dave?” someone called.

I walked through the hallway into the living room. Jimmy Nightingale stood at the screen, panama hat in hand, trying to see inside. He was wearing beige slacks and a maroon shirt and a windbreaker with a pair of aviator glasses sticking out of the breast pocket. “How you doin’, copper?” he said.

“Come in,” I said, pushing open the door.

“My secretary called me on the cell.” He shook hands, his eyes sweeping through the house, then brightening when they came back to mine. “You look good.”

“You, too, Jimmy.”

But Jimmy always looked good. He followed me into the kitchen.

“I have some gumbo on the stove,” I said. “Or would you like a cold drink?”

“I just ate at Clementine’s. You have such a nice place here. The park is right across the bayou, huh? Tell me the truth, did my secretary give you the impression she was blowing you off? She’s like that. But she’s a class act, believe me.”

I had forgotten that Jimmy often spoke in paragraphs rather than sentences. “She was fine,” I said.

“Always the gentleman,” he said, soft-punching me on the arm. “I bet you were calling about Clete Purcel.”