James Burke - Robicheaux

“I got to get to class at UL,” the kid said. “It’s all right.”

After we were alone, Jimmy said, “You look like you want to drop me.”

“You know the chief sign of narcissism, don’t you? Entitlement. That’s another word for self-important jerk.”

“I want to offer you a job. Maybe Purcel, too.”

“Doing security?”

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Arguing with me and telling me when I’m wrong. You know what LBJ said to Eric Sevareid when the two of them were watching Nixon’s inauguration on the tube?”

“No.”

“ ‘He’s made a mistake. He’s taken amateurs with him.’ I don’t want amateurs on my team.”

“I’ll start now, free of charge. Stop lying.”

“Liars own up on television to murdering defenseless Indians?”

“Hump your own pack, Jimmy. How’d you know where I was?”

“Your daughter was up. She’s back on the set, huh?”

“What about it?”

“I wish I was on it,” he said. “Hollywood is a magical place. I don’t care what people say about it.”

“Don’t tell that to your constituency,” I said.

“You think they don’t like movies? Who do you think has filled the theaters for the last hundred and sixteen years?”

He clenched his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers sinking into the flesh, fusing with the oil and sweat running out of my hair, his eyes next to mine, his breath on my skin. One of his feet stepped on top of mine. “Work with me. You can have power you never guessed at. We’ll turn the world into the Garden of Eden.”

As he walked away, I picked up a towel and wiped my face and neck and arms and hands, trying to cleanse his touch and the wetness of his mouth from my body and mind.

All day I was troubled by thoughts about Jimmy Nightingale. And Levon Broussard. And the way Kevin Penny and Tony Nine Ball and Spade Labiche had gone out. I have always believed there is no mystery to human behavior. We’re the sum total of our deeds. But that wasn’t the way things had been working out.

I was fairly certain Labiche had been on a pad for Tony and was told to set up a situation with T. J. Dartez that would put me either in prison or on the injection table. Other than that, I had no idea who’d killed Penny or who was pulling the strings on the surreal hit man known only as Smiley.

At the center of it all were Jimmy Nightingale and his foil, Levon Broussard. I suspected an analyst would say both of them had borderline personality disorder. Or maybe a dissociative personality disorder. Unfortunately, those terms would apply to most drunks, addicts, fiction writers, and actors.

Both men descended from prominent families in a state where Shintoism in its most totalitarian form was not only a given but most obvious in its sad influence on the poor and uneducated, who accepted their self-abasing roles with the humility of serfs. But there was an existential difference between the two families. For the Nightingales, manners and morality were interchangeable. For Levon Broussard and his ancestors, honor was a religion, more pagan than Christian in concept, the kind of mind-set associated with a Templar Knight or pilots in the Japanese air force.

For the Broussards, honor was a virtue that, once tarnished, could never be restored. They may have been aristocrats and slave owners who lived inside a fable, but they still heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux and accepted genteel poverty and isolation if necessary but would be no more capable of changing their vision of the world and themselves than Robert E. Lee could have become a used-car salesman.

That was why I had a hard time believing that Levon could have tortured and murdered Kevin Penny. I had even greater difficulty believing he would throw in his lot with Tony Nemo in order to weigh the balance in his upcoming trial in Jefferson Davis Parish.

On Monday morning, I got a call at my office from Sherry Picard. “I need your help,” she said.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, trying to suppress my feelings about Clete’s involvement with younger women in general and this one in particular.

“Catch you at the wrong time?”

“Not at all.”

“I still have prints from the Penny homicide scene that I believe are significant. The fast-food trash. Penny kept the area around his motorcycle clean. That means the person who left it there was on the property the day Penny died.”

“What does this have to do with me?” I said.

“I want to fingerprint the Nightingale employees. I’m not getting anywhere.”

“St. Mary Parish was teleported from the fourteenth century. Historians come from far away to study it.”

“Did I do something to offend you?”

“I can’t help you in St. Mary.”

“How about with Levon Broussard?”

“What about him?”

“I want to fingerprint his wife. I think she may have been an accomplice.”

“I’m not convinced Levon is guilty, much less his wife.” I could feel her resentment coming through the phone. I tried again. “What makes you suspicious about his wife?”

“Her general attitude. I think she needs a flashlight shined up her ass.”

How about that?

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely what?”

“That I heard you,” I said.

“What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Are you pissed off because of Clete and me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We called it off. That’s why you’ve got your tally whacker in the hay baler?”

“I’ll talk with Levon, Ms. Picard.”

“Detective Picard.”

I softly replaced the receiver in the cradle.

The phone rang three minutes later. I thought she was calling back. I felt embarrassed as I picked up the receiver and wished I hadn’t hung up on her. Surprise time.

“I heard you used to live in New Or-yuns,” a voice said. “You were a police officer in the Quarter.”

I sat up in my chair. “That’s right.”

“I had an artist friend who knew you. He painted people’s pictures in Jackson Square. He said you were an honest police officer.”

I waved my arm at a cop in uniform passing in the hallway. He looked through the glass. I pointed at the receiver. He nodded and disappeared down the hallway.

“What’s your name?” I said. “I’ll help you if I can.”

“I think you know who I am.”

“Not for sure. Are you visiting in New Iberia?”

“Some people call me Smiley.”

“That doesn’t ring bells.”

“I want to ask you a question.”

“Yes, sir, go right ahead.”

Helen was at the glass in my door now. I mouthed the word “Smiley.”

“Does the man named Purcel have a boy?”

“You mean Clete Purcel?”

“A boy lives with him?” he said.

“Clete doesn’t have a birth son, but he takes care of an orphan. Is that the boy you’re talking about?”

He cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

“You there, Smiley?”

“Yes.”

“Did you want to tell me something?”

“What’s the boy’s name?”

“Homer.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“Homer Penny is his full name.”

I waited in the silence. I had given up information I normally wouldn’t. But this situation was outside the parameters of any in my career.

“Did you try to hurt Clete, Smiley?”

“This call is a relay. It won’t help you to trace it.”

“I figured. That means we can talk as long as you want. Where’d you get your nickname?”

No answer.

“Know who your accent reminds me of?” I said. “Tennessee Williams. He said ‘New Or-yuns’ just like you. I knew him when he lived in the Quarter.”