“You got a number for security?”
“No,” I said. “What do you see?”
“A guy who looks like a smiling dildo. He’s carrying a box about four feet long and four inches wide.”
The man in front of us turned around again. He was Clete’s height, well groomed, thick-shouldered, a flag pin in his lapel, indignation branded on his face.“I’m about to have you removed.”
Clete’s eyes were round green stones. “What for?”
“You used a word about a certain female instrument.”
“How about this? Shut your fucking mouth.” Clete handed me the binoculars. “In the corner, ten o’clock.”
I looked but saw nothing. Clete took back the binoculars and looked again. “He’s gone.”
“We’ll tell security on the way out.”
The shots were rapid, two pops, then nothing. One blew apart a vase full of flowers by Jimmy’s foot; the other hit the staff of an American flag, cutting it in half, toppling the flag on a plastic bush. Hundreds of people ducked under the seats; some ran. Jimmy didn’t move. Instead, he detached the microphone from the stand and raised his left hand in calming fashion. “It’s all right, friends. Do not panic. I’m fine. Look at me. They can’t stop us. Do you hear me? Sit down. We’re the people. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come can separate us from the love of God.”
The response was thunderous, on the level of an earthquake, an exorcism of fear and even mortality itself, an affirmation that the man they had chosen was indeed the apotheosis of all that was good. I opened my badge and held it high above my head and, with Clete behind me, began working my way up the stairs on the far side of the building. The entire audience was on its feet and shouting incoherently. Down below, the spotlights glowed on Jimmy’s white suit with an iridescence just this side of ethereal.
Chapter 30
This time, the shooter had left his brass, a pair of .223 casings that were probably from a scoped rifle modeled on the old M1 carbine. I picked them up with a pencil and put them into an empty candy box I found on the floor and turned them over to a Lafayette police detective. Clete described the man he had seen with the elongated cardboard carton, and that was the end of our official participation in the attempted assassination of Jimmy Nightingale.
Clete was silent most of the way to New Iberia. We were in the Caddy, the top up. He turned on the radio, then clicked it off and huffed air out his nose.
“What’s eating you?” I said.
“I don’t buy what we saw.”
I knew what he was going to say. But I didn’t want to taint his perceptions by speaking first.
“Sociopaths are all the same,” he said. “Every one of them is vain. They’ll go to the injection table rather than admit an imperfection.”
“Are you talking about the shooter or Nightingale?”
“Our .223 man put one round in a glass vase that was no more than five inches across. The second clipped the flagstaff dead center. He hit two small objects three seconds apart from seventy yards but couldn’t nail Nightingale? Who’s kidding who?”
“I think you’re right.”
“You think Lafayette PD or the state police will pick up on that?”
“People believe what they want to.”
“Nightingale is a hypocrite. He brought immigrants from Costa Rica to work in his casinos and hotels.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Cletus.”
“No, I’m not. You’re always making excuses for this guy.”
“Heroes are hard to find these days. That’s why we have the bargain-basement variety.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“How about Levon Broussard? I always respected him. Now he’s making a film with Tony Nine Ball, and Alafair is working with them.”
Clete took out his flask and chugged it to the bottom. “I don’t like to drink in front of you, Streak, but sometimes that’s the only way I can put up with this crap.”
I had a professional and ethical problem Monday morning. The previous day, in front of St. Edward’s Church, Babette Latiolais had in effect told me that Spade Labiche had struck her in the face. She also had told me that she would not file charges. If I reported Labiche to Helen, she would take him to task, and he would lie and later slap Babette all over her house.
I went into his cubbyhole of an office. “I’m going to a noon meeting. How about joining me?”
He was drinking coffee, one leg resting across the trash can. “I’m boxed in today.”
“You’d be doing me a big favor, Spade.”
“How am I doing you a favor by going to an A.A. meeting?”
“It’s called the ninth step. Making amends to people we’ve hurt. I attacked you. I have to make up for it.”
“All sins are forgiven. I hear you were at the Cajun Dome when someone tried to grease Nightingale.”
“Clete Purcel and I were there.”
“I called it, didn’t I? I knew somebody would try to knock him off.”
“You knew what you were talking about. How about the meeting? Be a sport. It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?”
“You’ve got a brick for a head. Let me take a piss.”
The meeting was in the back of an electrical shop by one of the drawbridges, the windows painted over. The attendees were mostly working people. The room smelled of dust and old rags and machine oil that had soaked into workbenches. Before Labiche sat down, he flicked his handkerchief several times on the seat of the chair.
When the leader of the meeting asked newcomers to introduce themselves by first name only and not to put anything into the basket, Labiche did as requested and then began clipping his nails. It wasn’t long before I noticed something wrong. Two black women who were regulars and spoke often at meetings were silent, their eyes turned inward, their bodies shrunken, as though they were trying to make themselves smaller. Labiche reset his watch, sucked his teeth, and looked sleepily into space while an elderly man spoke of his wife’s death. Then Labiche went to the restroom, tucking in his shirt with his thumbs as he walked. One of the silent black women left in a hurry through a side door. The other bent deeper into herself, her eyes lidded. When Labiche returned, he stank of cigarette smoke.
After the “Our Father,” he helped stack a couple of chairs and followed me outside. The heat was ferocious, the wind like a blowtorch.
“How’d you like it?” I asked.
“Good stuff, but I don’t think it’s for me, Robo. I know I got kind of screwed up and depressed for a while and was talking a little crazy, but I’m okay now.”
“You and Miss Babette are okay, too?”
“Peaches and cream. What makes you think otherwise?”
“No reason. She’s probably had a hard life. She deserves a break.”
“You trying to tell me something?”
“No,” I said. “Did you know any of the people in the meeting?”
“You talking about those black whores? I think I busted one of them.”
“There’re no whores in A.A. Whatever people did before they came in doesn’t count.”
“Yeah, and all God’s chil’en got shoes, too,” he said. “This heat stinks. I need to get back to Florida. There’s nothing like that blue and green water down in the Keys.” He lit up, letting the smoke drift in my face.
“You’re done worrying about somebody clipping you?” I said.
The tropical vision that gave him a brief respite from his problems left his eyes. “What the fuck, man? You get me here to mess with my head?”
Something like that, I thought.
That evening Clete and I went to City Park and watched Homer play softball under the lights. Homer was still awkward with the bat, but he usually got a chunk of the ball and made it to first base. Once there, he was a greased laser beam on the bases. He came in under the tag on his face, like a human plowshare burrowing through the dirt. When the second baseman thought it was over, Homer was on his feet and headed for third. He got caught in the hotbox once, then scampered between the shortstop’s legs and went around third and almost sanded his face off sliding across home plate.