James Burke - Robicheaux

I could not sleep Sunday night, and on Monday I woke with a taste like pennies in my mouth and a sense that my life was unspooling before me, that the world in which I lived was a fabrication, that the charity abiding in the human breast was a collective self-delusion, and that the bestial elements we supposedly exorcised from civilized society were not only still with us but had come to define us, although we sanitized them as drones and offshore missiles marked “occupant” and land mines that killed children decades after they were set.

These are signs of clinical depression or maybe a realistic vision of the era in which we live. During moments like these, no matter the time of day or night, I had found release only in a saloon. The long bar and brass foot rail, the wood-bladed fans, the jars of cracklings and pickled eggs and sausages, the coldness of bottled beer or ice-sheathed mugs, the wink in the barmaid’s eye and the shine on the tops of her breasts, the tumblers of whiskey that glowed with an amber radiance that seemed almost ethereal, the spectral bartender without a last name, the ringing of the pinball machine, all these things became my cathedral, a home beneath the sea, and just as deadly.

Thoughts like these are probably a form of alcoholic insanity. But on that particular Monday morning, I preferred my own madness to what I had begun to feel, as Helen and Clete did — namely, that an inchoate sickness was in our midst, and it was as palpable in the hot wetness of the dawn as the smell of lions in the street at high noon.

At 9:33 A.M., I received another call from Sherry Picard.

“I need to talk to you or Clete,” she said. “Since he’s not in his office and not answering his cell phone, I called you.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

“I was warned about you two.”

“This is a business line,” I said. “If you have a personal issue, call me at home.”

“My ass. Did you try to dime me with the FBI?”

“That’s probably one of the craziest things I’ve heard in a while.”

“Because an agent just left my office. I have the distinct feeling that I’m being looked at for the Penny homicide.”

“Talk to the U.S. Justice Department,” I said. “The feds hate Clete’s guts. I don’t have contact with them. Most of them wouldn’t take the time to spit on us.”

“Don’t give me that. They’re in contact with your boss, which means they’re in contact with you.”

“Why would either Clete or I dime you, Detective?” I said.

“Because I told him we’re not right for each other. It was fun and now we move on. It was nothing personal. I thought he was a sweet guy.”

“Rejection is not personal. That’s wonderful.”

“You’d better stay out of my life and my career,” she said.

“Be assured I will.”

“I have a second reason for calling. Levon Broussard just came into the prosecutor’s office and confessed to torturing Penny to death. What do you think of that, slick?”

That was not all Levon did. After confessing to an ADA in the Jeff Davis courthouse, he went out the side door, drove to a low-bottom joint north of Four Corners in Lafayette, got plowed out of his head, and at sunset drove across his lawn to the gallery on the front of his house and announced to his wife, “Hi, honey, I’m home.”

Helen called me on my cell. “Get over to Levon Broussard’s place. It looks like he’s lost it.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Who knows? His wife called in the 911. He’s in the yard with a Confederate flag and a sword, ranting at the sky. He fired a flare pistol across the bayou and asked some people in a boat to come in for a drink. I think they’re still emptying out their shoes.”

I drove to his house. The sky was a red-and-black ink wash, the oaks he had named for Confederate officers chattering with birds. A patrol car was parked in the neighbor’s drive; another was parked by the tennis courts across the two-lane highway. I got out of my pickup and walked around the side of the house and through a line of camellia bushes into the backyard. He was sitting at a folding table under a huge oak by the bayou, the faded battle flag he had kept encased in glass hanging from an overhead branch. It looked like cheesecloth against the sunset. The dried blood of the drummer boy reminded me of the coppery stains on the Shroud of Turin.

Levon lifted a bottle of Cold Duck above his head. “Welcome to Chaucer’s blue-collar good knight. Or is it Everyman I see? Wrong evening for bromides, Davey.”

His face was oily and dissolute with booze. He had stabbed his great-grandfather’s sword into the sod by his foot. His teeth were stained with wine.

“Looks like you’ve had quite a day,” I said.

“How’s that, Davey?”

“Confessing to an ADA in Jennings. Scaring your friends in New Iberia.”

“Not so about scaring my friends.”

I nodded at the flag lifting in the breeze above us. “That should be in a controlled environment, shouldn’t? Protected from dust and humidity?”

“It survived Yankee artillery at Owl Creek. That’s where the Eighteenth Louisiana got torn to pieces. In fifteen minutes, forty percent were casualties.”

“You can’t win on yesterday’s box score. Why lose because of it?”

“That one zipped by me.”

“The past has no reality. The world belongs to the living.”

“You know better. You see them in the mists out at Spanish Lake.”

“See whom?”

“I love you for your diction, if nothing else. The boys in butternut. You see them slogging through the cypresses.”

“Who told you that?”

“They did,” he replied.

I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.

“Why did you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?” I asked.

“You don’t believe me capable of killing the man who raped my wife?”

“You didn’t try to kill the black guys who raped her in Wichita.”

“I’m making up for lost time.”

“Not with toggle bolts and an electric drill.”

“I thought that was an inventive touch.”

“Quit lying, Levon.” I pulled the sword from the ground and stuck the brass guard in his face. “Look at the names on there: Cemetery Hill, Sharpsburg, Gaines’s Mill, Chancellorsville. Would the soldier who was at these places torture a man to death, even a piece of shit like Kevin Penny?”

“No, he would not. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

“Good show. No cigar,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I placed my hand lightly on his upper arm. He shook his head and sucked in his cheeks. “Don’t underestimate the situation, Davey.”

“Call me Davey again, and I’ll break your jaw.”

He grinned up at me. “You’re a good guy. Butt out of this. Let others do their job.”

“You want one of our guys to cap you because you can’t do it yourself?”

“Maybe.”

“Get a card in the Screen Actors Guild. Come on. I’ll take you down to City Hall. Your lawyer will work out something. Helen isn’t going to let the guys in Jeff Davis cannibalize you.”

I heard the French doors open on the back porch, which was built of brick, high off the ground, and hung with ceiling fans. “Leave him alone,” Rowena said.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“He’s sick,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

I looked at her hands. They were empty. I walked toward her. “Don’t be a problem for me, Miss Rowena. Go back inside. We’ll take good care of him. You have my word.”

“He’s innocent.”

“I believe that.”

“So leave him here. Talk to him when he’s sober.”

“There’s a bigger question we need to deal with. Why is he confessing to a crime he’s not capable of committing?” There was a shine in his eyes. I looked at her a long time. “The question stands, Miss Rowena.”