James Burke - Robicheaux

Her eyes burned into his face. “She saw your car?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give her your name?”

“Just Smiley. Not my real name.” He looked at a thought inside his mind, a memory, a dark cloud that shouldn’t have been there. He blanched with guilt. “I said I had a friend named Miss Emmeline.”

A twisted cough came out of her chest. “You gave her my name?”

“She asked me, so I told her. I had already told one lie.”

“You know what you have to do now, don’t you, Chester?”

“No. Not what you’re thinking, Em. No.”

“Yes. And anyone with her. You shouldn’t have done what you did. You’ve been a bad boy.”

He hung his head and put his hands between his legs and clenched them with his thighs. She looked at her watch. “Take care of it, Chester. Now. Then call me. We’ll get through this.”

“The little girl and the people in the house?”

“We have to make sacrifices sometimes.”

He nodded, then rose from the chair like a man in his sleep. He went into the living room and looked at the chauffeur curled in a ball on the carpet. He watched where he stepped and heard the first raindrops of the storm striking the windows and the metal roof and the glass doors, saw the rain denting the waves, swallowing the sky, probably thundering down on a sailboat and crew that were trying to reach the shore.

He wondered if flying fish could lift above the waves during a storm of such magnitude. He wished a whirlpool would form around him and this house and Emmeline and suck them under the sea. He hefted up the carbine he had propped by the front door and walked back into the kitchen and fired until the bolt locked open on an empty magazine, the brass dancing like little soldiers on the hardwood floor.

When Helen and I arrived at the crime scene, the rain was driving hard on the bay, turning it into mist, sweeping in sheets across the roof of the house and deck. The 911 call came from a neighbor named Vidrine who said the daughter of his maid had told him about a man carrying a rifle. The neighbor had gone to the Nightingale camp and discovered the bodies. A fireman in a yellow raincoat with a hood met us at the door. He looked like a bewhiskered monk staring out of a cave. Behind us I could see the headlights and flashers of several emergency vehicles streaming through the rain.

“The dead guy is by the couch,” the fireman said. “One bullet wound through the back and out the chest. What looks like a double-edged puncture t’rew the throat.”

“Where’s the woman?” Helen said.

“In the kitchen,” the fireman said. “Nothing’s been touched or moved.”

“Good job,” she said. She went into the kitchen and came back out. “Emmeline Nightingale,” she said. “What a mess.”

“That’s the chauffeur on the floor,” I said. “His name is Swede Jensen. Clete got him a job as an extra in Levon’s movie.”

“Wrong place, wrong time?”

I nodded toward the bedroom. “Looks like they were getting it on.”

I went to the kitchen door. I had latex on; so did Helen. There was no brass on the floor or counters or table. It was impossible to count the number of wounds. Emmeline’s expression was one I had seen before: It was devoid of emotion. The eyes were fixed on nothing. The heart-bursting level of fear and pain, the violent theft of life and soul, the desperate plea that never left the throat would remain unrecorded, written on the wind, in the memory of no one except the killer.

Helen flipped open her phone and called the dispatcher. “Find Jimmy Nightingale and tell him to call me immediately. Tell his people nothing, and don’t take no from any of them. Out.” She looked at me. “I’ll take care of things here. Go up to the Vidrine place and talk to the little girl who saw the man with the rifle.”

“Got it,” I said.

“How do you figure this?”

“I don’t get it at all.”

“In what way?” she said.

“If the shooter is Smiley, I don’t see the motivation.”

“Sex,” she said. “When somebody does a number like that on a woman, it’s sex.”

I drove to the camp up the road where the little girl was waiting for me with her mother on a screened-in gallery. Their clothes were damp from the mist blowing through the screen.

“Can we go inside?” I said.

“Yes, suh, we just didn’t want to miss you,” the mother said. She was overweight and wore a dress and a man’s shirt with cutoff sleeves.

We went inside the small living room. The owners were gone.

“What happened to your employer?” I asked.

“Mr. Vidrine was upset,” the woman replied. “He said this ain’t suppose to be happening down here.”

I asked the little girl her name, then asked her to describe the man who carried a gun.

“His mouth was real red,” she said. “His name was Smiley.”

“What did his rifle look like?”

“It had a telescope on top and a can on the front.”

“What’d he say to you?”

“He told me the story of where flying fish come from. Sharks was always chasing and eating them, then a magic lady under the sea gave them wings so they could pop out of the waves and fly away.”

“That’s a pretty good story,” I said.

“It wasn’t him killed them people, huh?” she said.

“We’re not sure, Loretta. Did Smiley tell you where he was going or where he lives?”

“No, suh.”

“What kind of car did he have?”

“It was blue.”

I asked about the license and the model, but these were not the kinds of things a child her age would take note of.

“Maybe the man in the car that passed him might know,” she said.

“Which man? What car?”

“It was purple,” she said. “What do you call them kind? The top is like canvas.”

“A convertible.”

“I seen Smiley drive up the road in his li’l blue car. The convertible drove down to the point. Then the convertible come back up the road and I didn’t see it no more.”

“Think hard, Loretta. What did the man in the convertible look like?”

“I couldn’t see good. It was raining,” she replied. “He was big and had on a li’l hat.”

I stared at the mist and fog rolling off the bay, the bolts of lightning that flickered like snakes’ tongues in the clouds. What in God’s name are you doing, Clete? I thought.

“Can we go, suh?” the mother said. “I got to go home and fix supper.”

“Yes, y’all have been very helpful. Thank you,” I said.

The girl looked up at me. “I don’t t’ink Smiley would hurt anyone. Would he, suh?”

I didn’t answer and instead said good night and drove back to the crime scene. The paramedics were trundling the bodies on gurneys to an ambulance. Inside the house, Helen was talking on her cell phone to Jimmy Nightingale. Her face looked old when she hung up.

“Bad?” I said.

“He cried. I can never read that guy.”

“The little girl told me a big guy wearing a small hat and driving a purple convertible passed Smiley on the road. Smiley was headed north, the convertible was headed south.”

“Clete?” she said.

“Sounds like it.”

“You get his butt in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

I left three messages for him that night and one the next morning. I went by his office. His secretary said she thought he was in New Orleans.

“When will he be back?” I said.

“It’s Friday, Mr. Dave. In New Orleans. He’ll be back when he gets back.”

The double murder was the headline story in The Daily Iberian . I felt caught in a situation that was endless and had no good ending. The rain was unrelenting. We had gone from drought that had left the swamplands strung with dead vegetation to flooded fields and ditches and front yards and cemeteries in which caskets floated from the crypts. Levon Broussard was transferred to the jail in Jennings, then granted bail a second time. From all accounts, Jimmy Nightingale was devastated. I feared for Clete, because I believed he was becoming not only obsessed but irrational. I went to a noon meeting and passed when it was my turn to speak, primarily because I genuinely believed, as Clete and Helen did, that a shapeless and malevolent entity was in our midst. It was not the kind of stuff that improved a recovering drunk’s day.