James Burke: Robicheaux

Rowena answered the phone.

“Hello, Miss Rowena,” I said. “It’s Dave Robicheaux. Is Levon there?”

There was a beat, the kind that makes you wonder what kind of expression is on your phone party’s face.

“I’ll get him,” she said, and dropped the receiver on a hard surface.

“Hello?” Levon said.

I told him that Jimmy Nightingale wanted to take us to dinner.

“What’s he want with us?” Levon said.

“You’re a famous writer. He’s written some screenplays. Maybe he wants to do business.”

“Isn’t Nightingale hooked up with the casino industry?”

“Among other things.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“He’s helping Clete Purcel out of a jam. As a favor, he asked for an introduction.”

“So you’re being charitable at my expense?”

He had me. “You’re right. Forget I called.”

“Is Alafair there?”

“She’s living in Bodega Bay.”

I could hear him breathing against the receiver. Levon was known for his reluctance to say no to anyone when asked for money or to help with a personal problem. In fact, he seemed to live with conflicting voices in his head. “I don’t like these casino people, Dave. They put the Indians’ face on their operations, but most of them are out of Jersey.”

“So is Bruce Springsteen,” I said.

“How important is this?”

“Clete has screwed himself financially six ways from breakfast. Jimmy Nightingale can probably get him out of it. We’re talking about one hour at a dinner table.”

I heard him blow out his breath. “When?”

“Six-thirty tomorrow night at Clementine’s. I’ll call Jimmy and set it up.”

“Give Alafair my best. I love her new book.”

Before I could reply, he eased the receiver into the cradle.

Helen Soileau was in her third term as sheriff, a period when the Iberia Sheriff’s Department and the city police had merged. She had started her career as a meter maid with the NOPD and had worked her way up to patrolwoman, then returned to New Iberia, her birthplace, and worked as my plainclothes partner in our small homicide and felony assault unit. Helen defied all conventions and categorizations. Years ago a smartass told her at our department Christmas party that she had the perfect body for a man. She slapped him off the stool, slammed his head into the bar, then picked him up and propped him on the stool and placed a drink in his hand. “No hard feelings,” she said.

She had blond hair cut short at the neck, and she never dyed it; she wore slacks and sometimes makeup and sometimes not. Her love affairs included a dalliance with a female informant (which almost destroyed her career), a circus owner, a male masseuse, a feminist professor, and Clete Purcel.

The silence between her sentences was often louder than her words. She didn’t carry a throw-down or jam the perps, and as a consequence, she usually learned more from them than others did with coercion. I believed she had several personalities, one of which was a sexual adventurer whose eye sometimes strayed over me. I didn’t care. My feelings about Helen were the same as my feelings about Clete: I believed their virtues were poured from a crucible whose heat couldn’t be measured.

Monday morning she called me into her office. Through the window I could see Bayou Teche, the sunlight dancing on the surface, a concrete boat ramp on the far side. Her gaze lifted to mine. She had a ballpoint gripped in her right hand. She clicked it over and over.

“I got a call from T. J. Dartez’s lawyer,” she said.

“I suspected that was coming.”

“He says you threatened his client.”

“Not true.”

“What were you doing at his house?”

“I told him I thought he was speeding when he hit Molly’s car. I told him he wouldn’t have any peace until he owned up.”

Her thumb pressed and released the button on top of the ballpoint, click-click, click-click. “Those were your words?”

“More or less.”

“You know what a good liability lawyer could do with that?”

“I had another reason for being there. Tony Nine Ball offered to do some damage to him, maybe take him off the board.”

“You had a conversation with Tony Nemo about killing T. J. Dartez?”

“No, I had a conversation with him about a Civil War sword. On the other subject, I told him to stay out of my business. He said Dartez ran over a child in Alabama.”

“This isn’t coming together for me, bwana.”

“Tony likes to pretend he’s in tight with cops. He bought a sword at a flea market. It belonged to one of Levon Broussard’s ancestors. He either wants to make some money off it, or he wants to get close to Levon. Tony has been involved with two or three film productions. He’s a self-serving, greedy, fat shit. He’s not a complex man.”

She gave me a look and let the ballpoint drop on the blotter. “Keep clear of Dartez and Nemo.”

“I plan to.”

She stared into my face, her expression flat. As often was the case, I had no idea what she was thinking or who presently occupied her skin. Her hair looked lighter, sun-bleached, perhaps, thicker and more attractive, as though she had been out on the salt.

“Buy me lunch, Pops, and don’t give me any more of your trash,” she said.

Jimmy picked me up in a limo, and we drove up Loreauville Road and turned in to the long driveway of the Broussard home. The carriage lamps on the gallery were lit, the floor-to-ceiling windows glowing from the lighted chandelier in the hallway. The wind was up, and the trees were filled with shadows that seemed to battle one another. Three of his live oaks were registered with a national conservation society and named Mosby, Forrest, and Longstreet, perhaps indicating a tired and old and depressing Southern obsession with the illusion that war is grand. But I had a hard time thinking of Levon in that fashion.

He avoided crowds and formal social situations and conventional thinking, and he had a pathological aversion to people who asked questions about his work. He seldom spoke specifically of his family, but supposedly, they were related to Oliver Hazard Perry, John Mosby, Edmund Burke, and John Wilkes Booth. He said he’d grown up in Galveston, or Lake Charles, or Lafayette, or maybe all three, I’m not sure. He was one of those paradoxical individuals who became notorious for his obsession with privacy. He had lived in the tropics and had known leftists in Mexico and DEA agents in Colombia and CIA operatives who flew for an airline headquartered in Fort Lauderdale. Why he had been drawn into the edges of the New American Empire, no one knew. With his tall frame and genteel manners and kind face and egalitarian attitudes, he seemed to personify virtue. Strangely, although they looked nothing alike, he and Jimmy Nightingale made me think of bookends that belonged on the same shelf.

I sometimes saw Levon’s wife at Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette, in boxing trunks and a halter, sweaty and dedicated, slamming the body bag hard enough to rattle it on the chain. She was Australian and had dark hair and wide-set blue eyes that stared boldly into your face. She seldom spoke or smiled, and if she had any expression, it seemed to be one of puzzlement or wariness, as though the world were constantly deconstructing and reassembling itself before her eyes.

Before I could get out of the limo and ring the bell, Levon and Rowena came out the front door. Levon put his wife inside the limo, then leaned across the seat and shook Jimmy’s hand vigorously. “It’s very nice to meet you, sir. This is my wife, Rowena. Thank you for your kind invitation. How you doin’, Dave?”

That was Levon, the effusive gentleman no matter the occasion. But his cordiality had no influence on what was about to take place. Jimmy’s eyes were glued on Rowena’s. The connection was electric and naked to the degree that both of them were obviously embarrassed. She sat down heavily on the leather seat, her gaze never leaving Jimmy’s. “You’re a screenwriter?” she asked him.