“It’s me, Spade,” I said. “Dave Robicheaux.”
He seemed not to hear me. The fingers of his right hand twitched.
“I’m sorry this happened to you, partner,” I said. “You got a bad deal.” No reply, no reaction. I looked over my shoulder. The nurse had gone. “You want to tell me something?”
His fingers moved again, up and down, as though he were beckoning. I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. “Tell me what it is.”
His breath contained a stench like decomposition in a shallow burial or a body bag in a tropical country. “You.”
“You what?” I said.
“You want save...” His voice trailed off.
The neurologist had told me his hearing was destroyed. But maybe that wasn’t the case.
“Give it another try,” I said.
“Dartez... Seizure.”
I took a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his spittle from my cheek. I eased my hand under his and held it. “If you can’t do it, Spade, you can’t do it. In your mind, just tell the Man Upstairs you’re sorry for the mistakes you made. Don’t worry about anything else.”
I thought his left eye had been blinded. But it looked straight into mine. His voice was hoarse and coated with phlegm, the words rising from his throat like bubbles of foul air. “Epilepsy... he was strangling... something was in his throat... you tried to save him.”
“Go on.”
I felt his hand go limp in mine. “Hang in there, Spade. Come on, bud. Don’t slip loose.”
If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint, and for just a moment they seem to recede from your vision and somehow become lighter, as though the soul has departed or perhaps because they have surrendered a burden they told no one of.
I had brought nothing to record his words, but I didn’t care. I owed Spade a debt and wanted to repay it. I removed my religious medal and silver chain from my neck and poured it into his palm and folded his fingers on it and placed his hand and arm on his chest.
I walked down the corridor and ran into the nurse by the elevator.
“Is everything all right, Detective Robicheaux?”
“Just fine,” I said.
“Is he resting all right? It’s time for his sponge bath. Then we’ll be transferring him to hospice.”
“I think Spade will be okay,” I said.
“I’m sure he appreciated your visit. The poor man. What a horrible fate. It’s funny the things they say to you, isn’t it?”
“Pardon?”
“At the end, men usually ask for their mothers. But he asked for you. You must be very close.”
I drove home and fixed a cup of café au lait in a big mug and sat on the back steps. Snuggs flopped down on my lap, then sharpened his claws on the inside of my thigh. I set him down next to me, and like two old gentlemen, we watched a rainstorm march across the wetlands and let loose a torrent of hailstones that danced like mothballs all over the yard.
Chapter 33
The storm continued through the night, filling our rain gutters with pine needles and leaves, flooding the yard and most of East Main. The Teche was high and yellow at dawn, lapping into the canebrakes and cypress knees along the banks, the sun pink and the sky strung with white clouds and patches of blue. The trees were dripping audibly and throbbing with birds. It was a grand way to start the day, in spite of all that had happened.
Helen caught me at 8:06 A.M. in the corridor outside her office. “Inside, bwana.”
“Tony Nine Ball is upset?”
“No, half of St. Mary Parish is.”
I walked ahead of her. She slammed the door behind us. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“He told Alafair she probably gave good head.”
Her face went dead. Her early days at NOPD were not easy. She was not only a woman, she was a bisexual woman. The cruelty and abuse by a detective named Nate Baxter set new standards. He ended up facedown in a plate of linguini in a family restaurant on Canal.
“I’d do it over if I had to,” I said. “Fire me if you want. Nemo is a bucket of shit who should have been poured down the honey hole a long time ago.”
She sat behind her desk and picked at a thumbnail.
“This isn’t about Nemo?” I said.
“Labiche died last night. The head nurse says you were there.”
“I was.”
“And you knew he died?”
“Yes, he died with his hand in mine.”
“And you didn’t bother to call in? Or say what you were doing there? Or what he might have said before he caught the bus?”
“What he told me won’t change anything,” I said. “I didn’t have my recorder.”
“What did he say?”
“Dartez was having an epileptic seizure, and I tried to save him. There was something in his throat. That’s about it.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s why you dragged him out the window,” she said. “He had the plastic filter of a cigar lodged in his throat.”
“That’s it. Then I think Penny came up behind me and hit me with a rock or a chunk of concrete.”
“Labiche mentioned Penny?”
“No.”
“Nothing to suggest who might have sent Penny after you?”
“I believe it was Nemo.”
“You’re probably right. This won’t get you off the hook, though, will it?”
“I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”
She opened her desk drawer and took out my medal and silver chain and set them on the corner of her desk. “A nurse brought this by about fifteen minutes ago. She said you must have left it in Labiche’s hand, because nobody else was in the room with him.”
I picked up the chain and put it around my neck and dropped the medal inside my shirt. “Thanks.”
“You’re a piece of work, Pops.”
In a Seedy motel north of the Four Corners area of Lafayette, Chester Wimple sat on the side of his bed and stared at the window shade. The bottoms of his tennis shoes barely touched the floor. He wore a white painter’s cap with a long bill and a high square top, and brand-new pants that fitted his legs like buckets, and a stiff short-sleeved checked shirt, and a clip-on bow tie. When he tried to rethink the events in the Labiche house, his mouth and jaw contorted as though a puppeteer were playing a joke with his face.
He had never messed up a hit, or left loose ends, or allowed emotion to sully the virtuous nature of his work. Tidiness and cleanliness were his hallmarks. The left hand of God could not be otherwise. The words “creepy little snerd” crawled like worms in his ears.
On the bedspread were his .357, a scoped .223 carbine, a Beretta nine-millimeter — the earlier model with the fourteen-round magazine — and a World War II British commando knife, the blade double-edged, narrow, shining with an oily-blue liquidity, tapering into a dagger point. The steel was cold and hard when he picked it up and closed his palm on the handle, his lips parting, his phallus tingling inside his boxer shorts. This was the only weapon in his possession that had the personal touch, that brought him into eye contact with the target and allowed him a guilty pleasure not unlike the impure thoughts he was not supposed to have.
Yesterday he had received a new set of index cards at the general-delivery window. The drawings on each card and the names of the next targets caused him no difficulty. He did not know them or why they needed to be removed from the landscape, which, for Chester, was an antediluvian world governed by raptors and pterodactyls. The flowing calligraphy on the first card was the issue. The words seemed to contain a trap, the way words were used to trap him when he was a child. They made his eyes jitter and the window shade change from a warm yellow to a dull red that pulsed as though a fire were burning on the other side.