“Next time I try to come in your office, don’t let me in.”
“Okay, maybe that’s unfair. But maybe your deeper motivation is even worse.”
I got up to go.
“You want to believe people are better than they are,” she said.
“Send me a bill for that, will you?”
“Bwana go now. Bwana also shut mouth.”
Nobody put the slide or the glide on Helen Soileau.
* * *
I’D LIKE TO be humble and say Helen read both Clete and me correctly. To a degree, I guess she did. But there was a larger issue at work. You cannot watch the exhumation of a murdered woman from a bog and ever be quite the same. The degradation by the elements of an unpreserved human body is not a kind one. The earth, the primeval soup, if you will, is tenacious; it clings to the skin, peels it from the arms and face, the hair from the scalp. The eyes remain sunken, sometimes looking at you oddly, like chipped marbles pushed into dough by an insensitive thumb.
The eight women who were killed had no advocate. The cops assigned to the case early on were pitiful if not complicit. Any cop who is honest will tell you there are police officers in our midst who never should have been given power over others. Misogamy is a big part of their makeup. Sexual perversity as well. I’ve known both male and female vice cops who have the psychological makeup of degenerates and closet sadists. I’ve also known gunbulls who would have had no problem working in Dachau. That we protect them is beyond my comprehension. The hundreds of cops and firemen who went into the Towers on 9/11 knew they probably would not come out. What are the limits of human courage? The cops and firemen who walked into stairwells that were not stairwells but chimneys filled with flame and smoke, proved that the human spirit is unconquerable, and it is these men and women who define what is best in us.
The eight women who were murdered and dumped like bags of trash in a swamp probably never would find justice. The thought that Jimmy Nightingale was involved in the subculture responsible for their deaths gave me no rest. Plus, I had introduced him in good faith to Levon and Rowena Broussard.
I called him at his home. The same curt secretary answered.
“This is Detective Robicheaux,” I said. “Is Mr. Nightingale there?”
“No, he isn’t.”
“Can you tell me where he is?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s flying right now.”
“Flying where?’?”
“I wouldn’t know. He’s flying his plane. Can I assist you with something?”
“I wanted to ask him about charm schools. Do you have contact with any?”
“I’ll certainly pass on the information.”
“I didn’t get your name.”
“Emmeline Nightingale. I’m his cousin.”
“It’s nice to meet you, if only over the phone.”
“Thank you. Good-bye.”
Franklin was a short drive down the bayou. I checked out a cruiser, turned on the flasher, and headed down Old Spanish Trail into the past, into the fury and mire of bloodline complexities our ancestors tried to wall up with brick and plaster and mortar, hoping the earth would subsume and cover forever the sins they could not.
* * *
JIMMY’S FATHER HAD been known as a hunter of big game in Africa, an archaeologist and mining engineer, a linguist, and a world-traveling swordsman who may have been killed by a British parliamentarian he cuckolded. The mother came from the North and was disdainful and private and, in all probability, very unhappy and consequently very angry. She broke her neck in a steeplechase when Jimmy was fifteen.
I followed Jimmy’s driveway through a tunnel of oaks and parked in front of the columned porch on the house. I stepped out on the gravel and looked at the enormity of the house, the immaculate creamy quality of the paint, the wraparound second-story veranda that Southern belles had probably stood on in their finery and watched the boys in tattered butternut march down a long dusty road to defeat and privation or a Yankee prison. I heard the sound of a single-engine plane that had started to sputter, as though out of gas. The plane, one with pontoons, was a dull red and drifted like a leaf out of a deep blue cloudless sky. It touched down on the bayou’s surface at the same moment the propeller locked in a stationary position. Jimmy opened the cabin door and threw a small anchor attached to a rope over his dock, pulled the rope until it snugged tight, then brought the plane hand over hand into the shallows. He stepped up onto the dock as though alighting from a pleasure boat.