“I’m not right for this,” I said.
“How about you go on leave without pay instead?”
“I know all the involved parties, Helen.”
“Like everybody in this building doesn’t?”
I flipped open the folder and flipped it closed again. “What’s her emotional state?”
“Like a vase somebody dropped on a concrete floor,” she said.
“I never heard of Jimmy Nightingale abusing women.”
“His casinos clean out the pockets of pensioners and poor people. He hangs with Bobby Earl. He’s business partners with Tony the Nose. Remember when Tony and Didoni Giacano used to stick people’s hands in an aquarium full of piranhas?”
“Those were the good old days,” I said.
“Time to kick butt and take names, Streak.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
I WATCHED THE video. As in most interviews with sexual assault victims, the dialogue, the violation of privacy, and the demeanor of the victim were excruciating. For anyone who has a cavalier attitude about predation, he need only watch its influence on the victims in order to change his attitude. They cannot scrub the stain out of their skin. Over and over again, the assault flickers like a sado-porn film on a screen inside their heads, sometimes for months, sometimes years. This goes on until they turn over the fate of their assailant to a power greater than they are. I’ve known nine or ten rapists who beat the system. I was convinced every one of them carried an incubus that eventually pissed on their graves.
As I watched Rowena Broussard give her account on the video, I began to wonder if I was possessed of the male bias I never felt myself guilty of. She did not seem to be a person who could be lured easily into a vulnerable situation. She had lived in the third world, where moral insanity, social cannibalism, and violence against the poor are part of the culture. Her paintings were testimony to her anger at dictatorial regimes and imperious personalities and people who sought dominion over others.
I had seen her punch the heavy bag at Red’s Health Club with the kind of power and dedication that makes adventurous men think twice. Jimmy Nightingale was not a large man. She said he put a pillowcase over her head and wedged his knee between her legs and worked off her undergarment with one hand. She said she cried out and told him to stop, even begged. I wanted to believe her. I hated cops and judges and prosecutors who sided with a rapist, and I’ve known many of them. There is no lower kind of individual on earth than a person who is sworn to serve but who deliberately aids a molester and condemns the victim to a lifetime of resentment and self-mortification.
But my uncertainty would not go away.
I called Levon at home. “I need a medical report from your physician,” I said. “You and Rowena have to give him permission to release it.”
“What good will that do?”
“It will tell us if there was bruising. Or any number of other things.”
“Does that have to be public knowledge?” he asked.
“We can’t make a case without it.”
“Hasn’t she talked about it enough? I think there’s an element of voyeurism in this.”
“Are you serious?” I said.
“What if there are only minor scratches and a small bruise? Dave, the real damage was done in ways I don’t want to describe.”
“Y’all had better make up your minds.”
“All right, I’ll call Dr. LeBlanc.”
“Thank you.” I hung up without saying good-bye.
I used a patrolwoman to call Nightingale’s home and find out where he was. I didn’t want him prepared for the interview; nor did I want him coming to the department with an attorney. The patrolwoman told the cousin or half sister, Emmeline Nightingale, that she wanted to contact Mr. Jimmy about a contribution to the Louisiana Police Benevolent Association, for which she actually solicited funds.
I headed for his office in Morgan City. It was located not far from the big bridge that spanned the Atchafalaya River, with a view to the south of the shrimp boats at the docks and miles of emerald-green marshland and islands of gum and willow trees.
Jimmy was reading the newspaper, with one leg propped across the corner of his desk, when the secretary escorted me into his inner office. He put aside his newspaper and grinned as though God were in His heaven and all was right with the world. “My favorite flatfoot.”