“Don’t give me that. They’re in contact with your boss, which means they’re in contact with you.”
“Why would either Clete or I dime you, Detective?” I said.
“Because I told him we’re not right for each other. It was fun and now we move on. It was nothing personal. I thought he was a sweet guy.”
“Rejection is not personal. That’s wonderful.”
“You’d better stay out of my life and my career,” she said.
“Be assured I will.”
“I have a second reason for calling. Levon Broussard just came into the prosecutor’s office and confessed to torturing Penny to death. What do you think of that, slick?”
Chapter 36
That was not all Levon did. After confessing to an ADA in the Jeff Davis courthouse, he went out the side door, drove to a low-bottom joint north of Four Corners in Lafayette, got plowed out of his head, and at sunset drove across his lawn to the gallery on the front of his house and announced to his wife, “Hi, honey, I’m home.”
Helen called me on my cell. “Get over to Levon Broussard’s place. It looks like he’s lost it.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Who knows? His wife called in the 911. He’s in the yard with a Confederate flag and a sword, ranting at the sky. He fired a flare pistol across the bayou and asked some people in a boat to come in for a drink. I think they’re still emptying out their shoes.”
I drove to his house. The sky was a red-and-black ink wash, the oaks he had named for Confederate officers chattering with birds. A patrol car was parked in the neighbor’s drive; another was parked by the tennis courts across the two-lane highway. I got out of my pickup and walked around the side of the house and through a line of camellia bushes into the backyard. He was sitting at a folding table under a huge oak by the bayou, the faded battle flag he had kept encased in glass hanging from an overhead branch. It looked like cheesecloth against the sunset. The dried blood of the drummer boy reminded me of the coppery stains on the Shroud of Turin.
Levon lifted a bottle of Cold Duck above his head. “Welcome to Chaucer’s blue-collar good knight. Or is it Everyman I see? Wrong evening for bromides, Davey.”
His face was oily and dissolute with booze. He had stabbed his great-grandfather’s sword into the sod by his foot. His teeth were stained with wine.
“Looks like you’ve had quite a day,” I said.
“How’s that, Davey?”
“Confessing to an ADA in Jennings. Scaring your friends in New Iberia.”
“Not so about scaring my friends.”
I nodded at the flag lifting in the breeze above us. “That should be in a controlled environment, shouldn’t? Protected from dust and humidity?”
“It survived Yankee artillery at Owl Creek. That’s where the Eighteenth Louisiana got torn to pieces. In fifteen minutes, forty percent were casualties.”
“You can’t win on yesterday’s box score. Why lose because of it?”
“That one zipped by me.”
“The past has no reality. The world belongs to the living.”
“You know better. You see them in the mists out at Spanish Lake.”
“See whom?”
“I love you for your diction, if nothing else. The boys in butternut. You see them slogging through the cypresses.”
“Who told you that?”
“They did,” he replied.
I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.
“Why did you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?” I asked.
“You don’t believe me capable of killing the man who raped my wife?”
“You didn’t try to kill the black guys who raped her in Wichita.”
“I’m making up for lost time.”
“Not with toggle bolts and an electric drill.”
“I thought that was an inventive touch.”
“Quit lying, Levon.” I pulled the sword from the ground and stuck the brass guard in his face. “Look at the names on there: Cemetery Hill, Sharpsburg, Gaines’s Mill, Chancellorsville. Would the soldier who was at these places torture a man to death, even a piece of shit like Kevin Penny?”
“No, he would not. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”
“Good show. No cigar,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I placed my hand lightly on his upper arm. He shook his head and sucked in his cheeks. “Don’t underestimate the situation, Davey.”
“Call me Davey again, and I’ll break your jaw.”
He grinned up at me. “You’re a good guy. Butt out of this. Let others do their job.”
“You want one of our guys to cap you because you can’t do it yourself?”
“Maybe.”
“Get a card in the Screen Actors Guild. Come on. I’ll take you down to City Hall. Your lawyer will work out something. Helen isn’t going to let the guys in Jeff Davis cannibalize you.”
I heard the French doors open on the back porch, which was built of brick, high off the ground, and hung with ceiling fans. “Leave him alone,” Rowena said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
“He’s sick,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
I looked at her hands. They were empty. I walked toward her. “Don’t be a problem for me, Miss Rowena. Go back inside. We’ll take good care of him. You have my word.”
“He’s innocent.”
“I believe that.”
“So leave him here. Talk to him when he’s sober.”
“There’s a bigger question we need to deal with. Why is he confessing to a crime he’s not capable of committing?” There was a shine in his eyes. I looked at her a long time. “The question stands, Miss Rowena.”
“I’ll bring him to City Hall with our attorney in the morning.”
“You can bring yourself, but he’s going to jail. Right now.”
“Hold up there, Dave,” Levon said behind me. “No need for this.” He lifted the flag off the tree with the tip of his great-grandfather’s sword. “Let me put this away and we’ll be toggling off,” he said.
I looked back at Rowena. For the first time in the case involving the Jeff Davis Eight and Tony Nine Ball and Jimmy Nightingale and Levon Broussard and Kevin Penny, I knew what had happened.
Clete Purcel believed in straight lines. “Bust ’em or dust ’em” was his mantra. But there was a caveat. Clete was never what the Mob called a cowboy. He could be a violent man, but with few exceptions, his violence was committed in defense of others. Consequently, his greatest virtue became his greatest vulnerability, and his enemies knew it.
He told me about his encounter with Swede Jensen at Walmart, and about Jensen’s guilt and fear, or at least Clete’s perception of it. Then Clete stopped answering my calls. I should have known what was coming next.
Clete kept a custom-made extra-long foot locker in the garret above his office. In it were a cut-down Mossberg semi-auto twelve-gauge he’d taken off a hit man in Las Vegas, a Glock, two Berettas, a .44 Magnum, a derringer a deranged prostitute had pulled on him during a vice raid, a sap and a blackjack and a baton, a slim-jim, brass knuckles, a gun that fired a bean bag, Mace, a tear gas pen, a carton of flash grenades, handcuffs, wrist and waist chains, and the most unusual drop I’d ever seen, an engraved snub-nose gold-over-silver Colt Police .32 with ivory grips that only a collector or a rich man would own.
The drop came from the safe of a mobster who operated a lodge and casino above Lake Tahoe. Because the gun was a collectible, its serial numbers, all of them intact, were obviously registered, and the discovery of the pistol at a crime scene would lead the authorities back to the mobster, long dead, and more important, to the casino culture he represented.