“Maybe she wants to make sure Broussard goes down for the Kevin Penny homicide.”
“You think she could have done Penny?” I said.
“Ever look into her eyes? Two inkwells, midnight blue. She has antifreeze for blood.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I think Jimmy Nightingale killed Penny or had it done.”
“I don’t think you’re entirely objective, Cletus.”
“You’re right. I’d love to bust a cap on that guy.”
“Why does he get to you?”
“He scares me. I can’t shake the feeling.”
Ever have conflict with the concept of mercy? I’m talking about those challenges to our Judeo-Christian ethos that require us to forgive or at least not to judge and to surrender the situation to a Higher Authority. That’s badly put. The challenge is not the venerable tradition. The real issue lies in the possibility that the person to whom you’re extending mercy will repay your trust by cutting you from your liver to your lights.
That’s why I hated to be in the proximity of Spade Labiche. There was an accusatory neediness in his face, a baleful light in his eyes, as though others were responsible for his lack of success and the monetary gain and happiness that should have been his. Friday morning, he opened my door without knocking. “Can I throw up on your rug for a minute?”
How about that for humor?
“I’m pretty busy, Spade.”
He looked over his shoulder. “I got to talk to somebody. How about it, Robicheaux? You know the score, man. Not many people around here do.”
“Come in.”
“Thanks,” he said. He sat down in front of my desk and lit a cigarette.
“Not in the building, partner.”
“I forgot.” He mashed out the cigarette on the inside of my trash basket and let the butt fall on top of my wastepaper. There was a razor nick on his jawline and one under his left nostril. I could smell cloves on his breath. “What’s the update on this guy with the cannon that blows heads off at eight hundred yards?”
“There isn’t any.”
His face looked like a white prune. “No prints, no brass, no feds involved, no guesses about the identity of the shooter?”
“Nope.”
“Look, I knew people in Miami who had a couple of hotels rigged to set up congressmen and business types out for a good time. The skanks would be in the bar and get these guys juiced up and in front of a hidden camera that would film stuff you couldn’t buy in Tijuana. They’d squeeze these poor bastards for years. They had a perv working them, a guy they called Smiley. He never took a pinch, not for anything.”
“What kind of perv?”
“He gets off on splattering brain matter, that kind of perv.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I think my number is up,” he said. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “It’s a feeling you get. It’s like malaria or rheumatic fever. You feel sick all over and can’t shake it. I tried to tell you this before, man. You wouldn’t listen.”
“The first time I went down a night trail, I couldn’t stop my teeth from clicking,” I said. “A kid on point hit a trip wire and was screaming in the dark. We had to go after him. There were toe poppers all over the place. I didn’t think I could make myself walk through them. Then an old-time line sergeant whispered something to me I never forgot: ‘Don’t think about it before you do it, Loot, and don’t think about it after it’s over.’ What’s this dog shit about a sex sting in Miami?”
He pressed a hand against his stomach, grimacing. “I think I got an ulcer.”
I opened my drawer and threw him a roll of TUMS. “Catch.”
“You’re a coldhearted man.”
“This perv named Smiley is going to take you out?”
“People think I know things I don’t. I was in vice. You know what that means. I dealt with twenty-dollar whores and dime-bag black pukes. The average IQ was minus-ten.”
“You took juice from Tony Nine Ball?”
“Not juice. Tony’s associates had some stuff on me. So I cut their guys some slack a couple of times. Possession charges, nothing else. In Miami, not here.”
“What stuff?”
“Those cameras I mentioned in the hotels? There was this one working girl I thought was on the square. They got me good on the video. I was married.”
“Why is it I feel like you’re telling half of something?”
“I want to be a good cop. I’m seeing this Cajun girl, Babette. You know her. At the bar-and-grill. She’s a nice girl.”
“You’d better treat her as one.”
“Lay off it. I’m hurting enough. I’ve been hitting the sauce a little too hard. I know you’re A.A. I thought I could go to a meeting with you.”
I brushed at my nose. “You don’t need me to do that.”
“Like get lost?”
“The hotline is in the phone book. Dial them up.”
“Forget I came in here. That guy out there. I got a funny feeling about why he’s here. I mean the real issue.”
I leaned back in my chair and spun my ballpoint on the ink blotter. “What feeling is that?”
He squeezed his temples, his eyes crossing. “He’s got a list of people to pop. Jimmy Nightingale is one of them.”
“What do you base that on?”
“Nightingale is too smart, and he knows too much. He’s also got a reputation for shitcanning his friends after he gets what he wants. Don’t you get it? These people are like a bunch of scorpions in a matchbox. They kill each other all the time. Why should they care about us? They use us and throw us away.”
I had never seen a man more tortured by his own thoughts.
“You’re just going to stare at me and not say anything?” he asked.
“I think you need to talk to a minister or a psychiatrist, Spade.”
“I could have been your friend. Except you don’t want friends. You’re a hardnose. You think everybody has to cut it on their own.”
“Take it somewhere else, partner.”
He stood up. His skin was gray, the way people’s faces look when they see the grave. “I need help.”
I hated what I had to do. I wrote my cell phone number on a memo slip and handed it to him. “There’s a meeting at seven o’clock. I can pick you up.”
He crunched the memo slip and bounced it on my desk. “I’ll stick with drinking. I may get popped, but I’m not going to crawl. I’ll still be me, for good or bad. What will you be? A big fish in a dirty pond.”
“You said Jimmy Nightingale knows too much. Too much about what?”
“How Frankenstein works,” he replied. “What’d you think?”
I thought that, one way or another, my life was moving away from the night T. J. Dartez died. I was wrong. Sleep is a mercurial mistress. She caresses and absolves and gives light and rest to the soul in our darkest hours. Or she fills us with fear and doubt and disjointed images that seem dredged out of the Abyss. If you’re a drunk, she can instill memories in you that may be manufactured. Or not. And clicking on a bedside lamp will not rid you of them; nor will the coming of the dawn. They take on their own existence and feed at the heart the way a succubus would.
In the dream, I saw the face of Dartez behind the window of his truck, illuminated by the passing headlights of a vehicle on the two-lane. His mouth was red and twisted out of shape, a rubbery hole trying to make sound. His forehead struck the glass. Then I was grabbing him and pulling him through the window, his body thrashing. I came down on him with all my weight, reaching with my fingers for his face. Was I trying to gouge his eyes, to drive a thumb deep into a socket, to break his windpipe?
I woke shaking and sat on the side of the bed in the moonlight. I had never had such a bad dream except for the ones I’d brought back from overseas. Alafair stood in the doorway, backlit by a red light on a clock flashing in the hallway.