James Burke - Robicheaux

Nightingale laughed. “God, you’ve got the guts of a beer-glass brawl, Purcel. Come work for me.”

“I need my piece back.”

“Give it to him,” Nightingale said to the security man.

“Mr. Nightingale, I think you should let us handle this.”

“There will be none of that,” Nightingale said.

The security man handed Clete his snub-nose. Clete dropped it into his shoulder holster. A freshly waxed purple Lincoln with chrome-spoked whitewalls came out of the carriage house with Emmeline Nightingale in the back and Swede Jensen in livery behind the wheel.

“You’re behind that geek from Florida, Jimmy,” Clete said.

“Which geek is that?”

“Goes by the tag Smiley. You’re dirty. You know it and I know it, and I’m going to prove it.”

“The peace of the Lord be with you.”

“Stay indoors during lightning storms,” Clete said. He got into the Caddy.

Nightingale leaned down to the window. “I always liked you, Clete.”

“Watch your foot,” Clete said. He backed in a semicircle, breaking the flowers off the camellia bushes, and drove toward the highway, the sunlight splintering in the oak limbs above his head.

How do you get to a guy like Nightingale? he wondered. More important, who was he? A master of illusion or a guy with a genius IQ who was brain-dead when it came to morality?

Clete looked in the rearview mirror. The security men had gone back to their posts, but Nightingale still stood in the middle of the driveway, one hand lifted in farewell, as though he were saying good-bye to a friend from a previous life.

Clete called me and told me to meet him at Clementine’s at seven.

“What for?” I said.

“I think Nightingale got inside my head.”

“Come by the house.”

“It might be bugged,” he said.

“You’ve been thinking too much.”

“Yeah, I imagined the mercury tilt switch I found by my automobile.”

After supper I walked down to the restaurant. Clete was at the bar. He knocked back the whiskey in his shot glass and pointed at a table by the brick wall in the back of the dining room.

“Where’s Homer?” I said.

“Playing softball in the park.” He caught the waiter. “What are you having, Dave?”

“Nothing.”

Clete ordered a plate of étouffée and half a dozen raw oysters and a bottle of Danish beer. “I’m so dry I’m a fire hazard. Don’t get on my case because I’ve got to have a hit of this or that.”

“Lose the Mouseketeer routine, will you?”

“I got the willies.” He told me what had happened in front of Jimmy Nightingale’s home. “You think he’s just an actor? Nothing rattles him. For a minute he made me feel like we were old friends.”

“That’s Jimmy. He can be humble because he already owns what everyone else wants. What were you doing out there?”

“What I said I was going to do.” Clete kept his eyes on mine.

There was no one within earshot of our table. “You were actually going to bust a cap on him?”

“If I was sure he put the hit on Homer and me.”

“In his front yard?”

“I was going to take down the chauffeur, too. I was going to give them a fair chance, then smoke them.”

“This is madness, Clete.”

The waiter brought the Danish beer. Clete took a long swig, looking at me with a protruding eye. He set the bottle on the tablecloth. “Madness is when you let an innocent boy get maimed or blown apart, the way Nightingale did those Indians. Don’t give me any doodah, Streak.”

“Who’ll take care of Homer if you’re in Angola?”

“Thanks for the help. You really know how to say it.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” I said. I flicked my fingernail on the neck of the Danish beer. “No more of this tonight.”

Clete picked up the bottle and chugged it dry. I got up from the table and squeezed his shoulder, then kept going out the door and down the sidewalk in the summer night, the air heavy with the smell of jasmine, the water high and yellow and coursing with organic debris under the drawbridge. For just a fleeting moment, I wished the year were 1862.

Levon Broussard was transferred from custody in Iberia Parish to Jefferson Davis Parish. I did not believe he was guilty of the Kevin Penny homicide, but nonetheless I was glad he was gone, and I hoped that I would not be entangled with him and his wife for a while.

That wasn’t the way it worked out. Sherry Picard was in my office Thursday morning. I rose from my chair when she entered, but it was hard. “Good morning,” I said. “How are you? What brings you to town? Nice day.”

“You speak like you’re constipated,” she said.

“I have a tumor on my vocal cords,” I said. “It comes and goes. I’ve never understood it.”

“What’s with Levon Broussard? Why do you think he confessed?”

“Haven’t a clue,” I said, my face empty.

“Good try.”

“He’s in your jurisdiction, he’s your problem.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“Right now I’m worried about Clete Purcel. He has a terrible character defect. He’s a bad judge of people.”

I saw the color climb in her face. “I want to speak to Sheriff Soileau.”

“Bang on her door.”

“Listen—”

Then I saw her blink, the breath go out of her throat, a tremble in her chin.

I lowered my voice. “Look at me, Detective.”

“Look at you?” she said.

“Sometimes I get my head on sideways. I’m reactive. I don’t mean it.”

“I’m tired of getting fucked over,” she said.

I dropped my eyes. It was an unpleasant moment. Her need was obvious. There is no organizational injustice worse than putting a misogynistic cop or military officer in charge of female personnel. The abuse that follows is immediate, egregious, and cruel to the bone.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “I heard that you called one of your targets in Iraq or Afghanistan a sand nigger.”

“I was mad at Clete. He kept talking about the mamasan he killed by accident. I told him to let it go. I was deliberately crude about my own history. You think I’m a racist?”

“No.”

“You want to have lunch?” she said.

I opened the bottom drawer in my desk and lifted up a brown paper bag that was folded neatly across the top. Inside I kept a spare rain jacket and hood. “Brought my own.”

“I didn’t intend to hurt Clete. He’s a good guy.”

“So are you,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” She touched at a mole on her chin and looked at the ball of her finger. “See you around, hotshot. Keep it in your pants.”

I watched her walk out the door. I had a feeling that Sherry Picard cast a large net. Maybe that was just my imagination.

On a Peninsula that extended into the Gulf of Mexico, Chester Wimple followed the Lincoln driven by the chauffeur with peroxided hair that reminded him of popcorn butter. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, the flags on the boathouses and the elevated camps snapping, waves breaking against the chunks of concrete that had been dumped along the banks to keep the peninsula from eroding away. Chester could see Emmeline in the backseat of the Lincoln, in sunglasses, a scarf on her head.

The Lincoln turned in to a camp at the end of the peninsula, and Emmeline and the chauffeur went inside, laughing.

At what? Had Chester set the bomb in the Cadillac owned by the fat man, he might have killed a child. That was something to laugh at? No, Emmeline couldn’t hurt a child. Not after what she and Chester had suffered in the orphanage in Mexico City.

Chester parked his rented car on a lot that had been left deserted after Hurricane Rita wiped out the structure and left little except clusters of banana plants and windmill palms and persimmon trees. Because it was a weekday with a forecast of storms and lightning, few of the other camps were occupied. He got out of his car with his binoculars and scoped .223 carbine and worked his way along the bank until he had a good view of the Lincoln and the camp to the south, backdropped by waves that were swelling higher and higher.