James Burke: Robicheaux

“Not really. I try at it.”

“Does anyone have a drink?” she said.

“I started to ice some champagne, but I didn’t think we’d be long in getting to the restaurant,” Jimmy said.

“We’re fine,” Levon said.

“I’m starved and dry,” she said. “Can we get the bloody hell out of here?”

“Right-o,” Jimmy said. He tapped the glass behind the driver.

“Is this your vehicle?” Levon said.

“My vehicle? No, it belongs to the car service,” Jimmy replied clearly, not sure what was happening. “I’m not that uptown.”

“Hello, Miss Rowena. I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said. “I’ve seen you at Red’s health club in Lafayette.”

“You’re who?”

“We spoke on the phone.”

Her window was up. She stared at her reflection in the dark. Then she turned and looked at Jimmy again, as though seeing him for the first time. Levon leaned forward, interdicting her line of sight. “You keep company with Bobby Earl, Mr. Nightingale?”

“Call me Jimmy. I know Earl, but I wouldn’t call him a close friend.”

“A friend nonetheless?” Levon said.

“Judge not, lest you be judged,” Jimmy said.

“What’s to judge? His record is demonstrable, isn’t it?” Levon said. “If he had his way, the bunch of us would be soap.”

“I think he’s paid for his sins,” Jimmy said.

“His time in prison?” Levon said.

“Considering the ethnic makeup of the population, I suspect he found himself in the middle of a nightmare,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t think that’s much solace to the victims of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Oh, shove it along, you two,” Rowena said. She massaged the back of her neck and rotated her head, glancing sideways at Jimmy.

“Good advice,” Jimmy said, reaching for something on the floor.

Rowena rolled down her window, flooding the limo with the smell of night-blooming flowers and the sprinklers spinning on the St. Augustine grass in the dark. “Look at the stars. Did you ever see Night Has a Thousand Eyes ? When the constellations are out, I always think of that movie. Look, each star is vaporous.”

“What do you have there?” Levon asked.

“A sword,” Jimmy said, lifting it into the light. “I think it belonged to your great-grandfather. I’d like you to have it.”

Levon looked at the name incised on the handle. “My God, where did you get this?”

“Did anybody hear me?” Rowena said. “Has anyone seen Night Has a Thousand Eyes ?”

“I have,” Jimmy said. He pushed the sword away when Levon tried to return it. “It starred Edward G. Robinson and Gail Russell. Did you see her in Angel and the Badman or Wake of the Red Witch ?”

“Yes,” Rowena said, her face thrust forward, her wide-set eyes filled with interest.

“How about rolling up the window, Rowena?” Levon said. “The air smells like insecticide.”

“If that’s what everyone wants,” she replied.

“Listen here,” Levon said. “I can’t accept this gift.”

“Maybe we can give it to a museum,” Jimmy said. “It needs to be somewhere other than in the hands of its previous owner.”

Levon waited for Jimmy to continue.

“I got it from Fat Tony Nemo. He bought it at a flea market,” Jimmy said.

“You know Nemo?” Levon said.

“He poured the concrete for a couple of my buildings.”

“I forgot. He does that when he’s not killing people,” Levon said.

“Tony was out of the rackets twenty years ago,” Jimmy said.

“Is that right, Dave?” Levon said. “This guy who used to break arms and legs with a baseball bat found salvation?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I replied, regretting the choices I had made to help Clete.

“Could you tell your driver to go a little faster?” Rowena said to Jimmy. “I’m about to faint.”

“No Down Under histrionics tonight,” Levon said.

“Oh, balls,” she said.

“I need to write you a check for this,” Levon said to Jimmy.

“Show me the secret to your novels instead.”

“Beg your pardon?” Levon said.

“I’m envious. They’re marvelous books. Your prose is magical. I want to know how you do it.”

Then Rowena said something I didn’t expect, considering the undisguised arousal Jimmy obviously caused in her: “We all have our private cubbyholes, love. Don’t be fucking with them.”

The chauffeur was a peroxided, crew-cut, steroid-pumped weight lifter with a concave-shaped face whose eyes looked like lumps of lead in the rearview mirror. I wanted to get in the front with him.

Clementine’s was on Main Street in a building that once was a saloon and pool hall and betting parlor, with wood floors and a stamped tin ceiling and a long bar and cuspidors and a potbelly stove, in a time when saloon owners one night a week covered pool tables with oilcloths and served free robin gumbo. Now it was a fine restaurant, with a large formally attired staff and sometimes a famous movie actor or musician among the guests.

Unfortunately, none of this was of any comfort to me. The atmosphere at our table was poisonous, the tension unbearable, primarily because there was no way to both acknowledge and resolve the problem, which was raw hatred between Jimmy and Levon and, I suspect, a flicker or two of the green-eyed monster in Levon.

“You understood about my writing a check, didn’t you?” Levon said.

“If you want,” Jimmy said.

“There’s no ‘if’ to it.”

Jimmy smiled. “I think I gave him two thousand for it. Why don’t you give that amount in my name to a charity?”

“Why don’t I just leave it on the table for the waiter?” Levon said.

Rowena was on her third glass of burgundy. “My grandfather was at Gallipoli. A neighbor tried to give him a souvenir bayonet to cut his hundredth birthday cake. Grandfather told him where to park it.”

“Lower the volume, Rowena,” Levon said.

“Fuck if I will,” she replied.

How about that for conversation in a small city on Bayou Teche where decorum is a religion and manners and morality are interchangeable?

The back of my neck was burning, my scalp drawing tighter each time Rowena had something to say. I went to the restroom, located in a separate building by the patio, and washed and dried my face and went back inside. The bar area was crowded, but in the midst of drinkers, I saw Clete Purcel hunched over a po’boy sandwich and a frosted mug of beer.

When I went to places where alcohol was served, I usually avoided sitting at the bar or at tables where people were there to drink rather than eat. Those distinctions might seem foolish to normal people, but the slip that puts a sober alcoholic back on the dirty boogie usually has innocuous origins. You accidentally eat chocolate cake that has whiskey in it; there’s brandy in the plum sauce; two miles from shore, the sun blazing on your head, a friend tosses you a cold can of Miller from the ice chest; or worse, you wake at one in morning, your head full of nightmarish images, and rather than deal with your dragons, you put on your beat-up leather jacket and a wilted hat and find an end-of-the-line dive that has no clocks or windows.

But I wanted to be near Clete, the man who’d carried me down a fire escape when I had two bullets in my back, a man who sought excoriation and feared approval, a blue-collar iconoclast who had to look up the word.

“Can you tell me how to get to Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room?” I said. Sharkey’s joint on Bourbon used to feature musicians like the Kings of Dixieland and Johnnie Scat Davis and Louis Prima and Sam Butera, and Clete and I had spent many wasted days and nights there.

Clete jumped when I put my hand on his shoulder. “Jesus, Dave, you know I have a coronary when people walk up on me like that? When did you come in?”