James Burke: Robicheaux

“Clete’s sorry about the encounter at the casino.”

“Sprinkling his head with ashes? Using a flagellum on his back, that sort of thing?”

“Clete doesn’t mean half the things he says.”

“Finish your supper while I explain something. Come on, sit down.”

That he was inviting me to sit down in my own house didn’t seem to cross his mind. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed and opened his eyes as though fatigued. “I flew a biplane today and got a little sunburned. Ever go up in one?”

I shook my head.

“I wish I could have been in the Lafayette Escadrille. Dancing around the skies of France and Belgium, giving the Red Baron a tap or two with the Vickers.”

“War is usually interesting only to people who haven’t been to one.”

“You should have been a funeral director, Dave.”

“Clete says you own the mortgage on his house,” I said.

“I own part of a lending company that does. He thinks I’m having him evicted because of a little incident at a craps table?”

“Are you?”

“I forgot it two minutes after it was over.”

“People call you a cunt in public with regularity?”

“Wow, you know how to say it.”

“Cut him some slack, Jimmy.”

Then he surprised me. “I’ll look into it. If there’s something I can do, I will.”

“I have your word?”

“I just gave it to you.”

I forgot to mention Jimmy was a very good baseball pitcher, both in the American Legion and in college. His best pitch was the changeup, when you hold the ball in the back of your palm and leave the batter swinging at empty space.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You getting along all right? Since the accident?”

“I don’t talk about it much.”

“I understand.”

He gazed through the back window. The lawn was deep in shadow, the air tannic and cold, the ground strewn with yellow leaves spotted with black mold. The door hung open on the hutch that once housed our pet coon, Tripod, the wood floor clean and dry and empty. “I love your place,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s out of another era. A more innocent time.”

“Why do you pal around with a shitbag like Bobby Earl?”

“The eyes of God see no evil,” he replied.

“I’ve always envied people who know the mind of God.”

“I’ll call you by the end of business tomorrow on that mortgage situation. Can you do me a favor?”

I waited.

“This novelist who lives up the Teche on Loreauville Road, you know him?”

“Levon Broussard?” I said.

“That’s the baby. How about an introduction?”

“You need me for that?”

“I hear he’s a little eccentric and his wife got kicked off a spaceship.”

“You’re the second unlikely person to say something to me today about the Broussard family. The other was Tony Nemo. Is that coincidence?”

“You know what they say at meetings. Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.”

“I didn’t know you were in the program.”

“I’m not. I go for the dialogue. It’s great material.”

“I’ll ask Levon if he wants to have dinner with us.”

Jimmy made a snicking sound in his jaw. “That’s my man. Make it soon, will you? I really dig the guy’s work. I’m going to get a shotgun house just like this. See you.”

He tapped me on the shoulder with his hat and went out the door. Jimmy kept it simple.

After sunset, I drove to the rural two-lane highway where Molly’s car had been struck broadside on the driver’s door, knocking her unconscious, pinning her inside. I had revisited the site more than a dozen times, either at night or before sunrise, when there was little traffic. There was a Stop sign at the access road, then nothing but the long curving bend of the two-lane. By flashlight I had looked for the pickup’s skid marks, re-created every possibility about the speed of the pickup, and measured the exact distance from the bend to the Stop sign. The speed limit was forty-five miles an hour, the speed the pickup driver said he was traveling when Molly’s Toyota had suddenly come through the Stop sign and made a reckless left turn in front of him.

I used a stopwatch to compute the time it would take for the pickup driver to traverse the distance from the bend to the point of impact if he were driving the legal limit. The math led to only two possible conclusions: Either Molly ran the Stop sign, abandoning all reason; or she looked to the left, saw nothing coming, then looked to the right, saw the road was clear, and turned left without looking again and got crushed.

But Molly never ran stop signs. She would never willingly break a law of any kind. The skid marks, now washed away, were no longer than eighteen inches in length, indicating the pickup driver saw her car only seconds before the collision. Everything in me told me that Molly probably failed to double-check the two-lane before she started her turn, and the pickup driver lied and was coming much faster than forty-five miles an hour. The causes of the crash were shared ones.

Like many victims of violent crimes who never find justice, I became obsessed with speculations I could not prove. I told myself that Molly’s fate could have been worse, that the Toyota could have burst into flame while she was conscious and trapped inside, that she could have spent the rest of her life as a vegetable or disfigured beyond recognition or left a quadriplegic. I soon began to gaze into space at the office, in the middle of conversation, on a street corner, my hands balling, while others stared at me with pity and concern.

I had never confronted the driver or even spoken to him, because he was part of an official investigation, and my contacting him would have been improper. But the day after I talked with Fat Tony, I drove up the Teche to what were called the Quarters, outside the little town of Loreauville. The Quarters were composed of cabins and shotgun houses that went back to the corporate-plantation era of the nineteenth century. Most of them were painted a yellowish gray and aligned in rows on dirt streets with rain ditches and bare yards where whites and people of color lived in harmony and seemed to enjoy the lives they had. On weekends the residents barbecued and drank beer on their small galleries, washed their cars in the yard, and flew kites and played softball in the streets with their children. I don’t mean to romanticize poverty. The Loreauville Quarters were a window into my childhood, a time when few people in the community spoke English and few had traveled farther than two parishes from their place of birth. It wasn’t a half-bad world in which to grow up.

I found his name, T. J. Dartez, on a mailbox. I slipped my badge holder and my clip-on holster from my belt and put them under the seat, and stepped across the rain ditch into his yard. An old washing machine converted into a barbecue pit was smoking on the gallery, a chicken dripping in the coals. I heard children’s voices in back. I walked up the dirt driveway. A dented washed-out blue pickup was parked in a shed. An unshaved man in work pants and a clean strap undershirt was lobbing a Wiffle ball at two little girls armed with plastic baseball bats. His hair was black and greasy and curly on the back of his neck. He turned around, smiling. The stub of a filter-tipped cigar was clenched in his teeth. I had never seen him before.

“You looking for somebody?” he asked.

“Are you Mr. Dartez?”

“Yes, suh.”

I stared at him. I don’t know for how long. The little girls looked about six and eight. They had both gone silent. “I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

I glanced at the girls. “A serious matter.”