There was a collective “Yes, ma’am!”
“You stay, Dave,” she said.
She waited until everyone else had gone. There was a solitary red rose in a slender glass vase on her desk. “This is eating my lunch.”
“Don’t let it,” I said.
“We’ve got a guy killing people all over Acadiana, and we don’t know his name. We don’t have prints or weapons; all we have is two casings from the Cajun Dome that were wiped clean. Nobody is that good.”
“Nothing more from the feds?”
“They’ve heard of a guy working out of Miami named Smiley. They don’t know any more than we do.”
“Maybe we’re all looking in the wrong place,” I said. “Maybe he’s from overseas. The Mob used to bring hitters in from Sicily. They’d stay with a local family, wash the dishes, do the hit, and go back home.”
She tried to straighten the rose in the vase, then picked up a petal that had fallen on the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Her eyes seemed out of focus.
“That’s a pretty flower,” I said.
“A fellow gave it to me for my birthday. A fellow I might start seeing.”
I had no idea why she was behaving the way she was. “You okay, Helen?”
“There was a worm right in the middle of the rose. Funny, huh?”
I knew better than to say anything.
“It’s like Smiley,” she said. “He’s out there, invisible, always ready to do harm.”
“He’s just a guy, nothing more.”
She sat back in her chair, her gaze receding. “You know better.”
I wasn’t going to pursue the subject. I had known Red Cross personnel and American soldiers who had been at the liberation of Ravensbrück and Dachau. None of them was ever the same again. They also spent the rest of their lives trying to explain the nature and sources of evil. Cops fall easily into the same trap. A day comes when you see something that you never talk about again, and it lives with you the rest of your days.
“We’ll get him,” I said.
“I’m not talking about Smiley or whatever his name is. It’s something else. And I say ‘it’ deliberately.”
“Keep it simple, Helen.”
“Jimmy Nightingale is involved in this.”
“That’s not what the evidence indicates.”
“Maybe he didn’t rape Rowena Broussard, but I think he knew Kevin Penny did. Maybe he even sicced him on her.”
“We’ll never prove that, Helen. Let it go.”
“I saw him at the Winn-Dixie yesterday. People were lining up to shake his hand. He put his arm over my shoulders. I felt like I’d been molested.”
I had never heard her talk like this. “You think he’s the third Antichrist in Nostradamus?”
“No, I think he’s Huey Long on a national scale, and that scares the shit out of me.”
That night I drifted off to sleep while watching the local news. When I woke, I realized I was listening to the voice of Jimmy Nightingale. He was confessing to the satchel bombing of the Indian village in South America. There were tears in his eyes. He could have been a character actor in a medieval Everyman play. Out on the salt, he had told me the same story; I believed then and I believe now that he was at least partially contrite. But the man I saw on television that night was a man who could sell snow to Eskimos and electric blankets to the damned.
I drove to baron’s Health Club in New Iberia at five-thirty the next morning and went to work on the speed bag.
“I’m glad that’s not my face you’re hitting,” a voice behind me said.
I turned around. “Visiting with the lumpen proletariat?”
“I’ll buy you breakfast at Victor’s,” Jimmy said.
“Forget it.”
“What’d I do now?”
“I caught your performance on the news last night.”
“Performance?”
I let my hands hang at my sides, my bag gloves tight on my knuckles, the blood hammering in my wrists. I could smell my own odor. “You and I talked about that situation in South America. I thought you were genuinely sorry for the bad choice you made.”
“I like that terminology. Yeah, bad choice. It’s the kind of crap you hear in Hollywood.”
“I didn’t finish. I think you’re using the suffering of the people you maimed and killed to further your career. That takes a special kind of guy.”
“That’s pretty strong, Dave.” He rested one hand on my shoulder, even though my T-shirt was gray with sweat.
“I don’t like people touching me.”
He lowered his hand. “Take a shower. We’ll eat breakfast and talk. I always looked up to you. You know that.”
“I have to go to work.”
A kid was hitting the heavy bag, hard enough to make it jump on the chain.
“Can you give us a minute?” Jimmy said.
“Sure,” the kid replied awkwardly, as though he had done something wrong.
“Hang on, podna,” I said. “Mr. Jimmy and I are going outside.”
“I got to get to class at UL,” the kid said. “It’s all right.”
After we were alone, Jimmy said, “You look like you want to drop me.”
“You know the chief sign of narcissism, don’t you? Entitlement. That’s another word for self-important jerk.”
“I want to offer you a job. Maybe Purcel, too.”
“Doing security?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Arguing with me and telling me when I’m wrong. You know what LBJ said to Eric Sevareid when the two of them were watching Nixon’s inauguration on the tube?”
“No.”
“ ‘He’s made a mistake. He’s taken amateurs with him.’ I don’t want amateurs on my team.”
“I’ll start now, free of charge. Stop lying.”
“Liars own up on television to murdering defenseless Indians?”
“Hump your own pack, Jimmy. How’d you know where I was?”
“Your daughter was up. She’s back on the set, huh?”
“What about it?”
“I wish I was on it,” he said. “Hollywood is a magical place. I don’t care what people say about it.”
“Don’t tell that to your constituency,” I said.
“You think they don’t like movies? Who do you think has filled the theaters for the last hundred and sixteen years?”
He clenched his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers sinking into the flesh, fusing with the oil and sweat running out of my hair, his eyes next to mine, his breath on my skin. One of his feet stepped on top of mine. “Work with me. You can have power you never guessed at. We’ll turn the world into the Garden of Eden.”
As he walked away, I picked up a towel and wiped my face and neck and arms and hands, trying to cleanse his touch and the wetness of his mouth from my body and mind.
Chapter 35
All day I was troubled by thoughts about Jimmy Nightingale. And Levon Broussard. And the way Kevin Penny and Tony Nine Ball and Spade Labiche had gone out. I have always believed there is no mystery to human behavior. We’re the sum total of our deeds. But that wasn’t the way things had been working out.
I was fairly certain Labiche had been on a pad for Tony and was told to set up a situation with T. J. Dartez that would put me either in prison or on the injection table. Other than that, I had no idea who’d killed Penny or who was pulling the strings on the surreal hit man known only as Smiley.
At the center of it all were Jimmy Nightingale and his foil, Levon Broussard. I suspected an analyst would say both of them had borderline personality disorder. Or maybe a dissociative personality disorder. Unfortunately, those terms would apply to most drunks, addicts, fiction writers, and actors.
Both men descended from prominent families in a state where Shintoism in its most totalitarian form was not only a given but most obvious in its sad influence on the poor and uneducated, who accepted their self-abasing roles with the humility of serfs. But there was an existential difference between the two families. For the Nightingales, manners and morality were interchangeable. For Levon Broussard and his ancestors, honor was a religion, more pagan than Christian in concept, the kind of mind-set associated with a Templar Knight or pilots in the Japanese air force.