Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“Really? Then you have my dispensation. Forget I’m a cop, too.”

He looked away, his hands balling. “Come inside.”

“What for?”

“I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade in my office. Keep it quiet, though. Rowena is asleep.”

He unlocked the French doors on the patio and waited for me to walk ahead of him. A pitcher and a glass sat on a folding table by his desk. He filled the glass and wrapped it with a paper napkin and handed it to me, then went to the kitchen and got a glass for himself. For the first time, behind the door, I saw a sun-faded Confederate battle flag mounted on the wall in a glass case. He came back into the room.

“A fourteen-year-old boy carried that up the slope on Beauregard’s left flank at Shiloh,” Levon said. “They were supposed to be supported by the founder of Angola Penitentiary, but he didn’t show up. Forty percent were casualties in fifteen minutes.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I disliked people who thought war was a glorious endeavor, and I disliked those who enjoyed talking about it. I despised those who had not seen war yet espoused it and lived vicariously through the suffering of others and never gave a thought to the civilians and children who died in burn wards or were buried under collapsed buildings.

Levon was not one of these. He had gone unarmed and with a leftist reputation into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua when bodies were dumped off trucks with the morning garbage. Yet here we stood in reverence before an iconic flag that retained the pink stain of a farm boy’s blood, and whether anybody would admit it or not, the cause it represented was the protection and furtherance of human bondage.

“You have nothing to say about it?” he asked.

“Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. The statement doesn’t make the poor man any less honorable or brave.”

“You don’t give an inch, do you.”

“No.”

“That’s not a compliment,” he said.

“I didn’t think it was. How’s your wife?”

“On painkillers.”

He sat down in a swivel chair behind his desk and opened a bottom drawer and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and let it drop on top of the desk. “You on or off the grog?”

“No, thanks.”

He poured three inches into his glass. I watched the lemonade change color, the ice rise frosty and thick. He took a long pull, watching me, then wiped his mouth. “Nightingale and his sister or whatever she is have one agenda. They want to kill the rape story in the bud. They’re using you to do it.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Nightingale is a master manipulator, Dave. He fleeces uneducated and compulsive people in his casinos, pretending to be their friend, when in reality he wouldn’t take time to piss in their mouths if they were dying of thirst. This guy might be our next United States senator. He might even end up in the White House. Think about that for a minute.”

“What is it you’re not telling me about your wife?”

“What makes you think I’m hiding something?”

“Because you’re a smart man who allowed his wife to destroy the forensic evidence that would have made the case against Nightingale.”

His eyes went away from me. “My wife is bipolar. She’s also barren. Occasionally, she does things that are irrational. But none of that alters the fact that she was assaulted by that son of a bitch over in St. Mary Parish.”

I was sitting on the couch a few feet from him. “I might be indicted in the death of the man who killed my wife.”

“Why are you telling me that now?”

“I know what it feels like to be disbelieved.”

“You didn’t do it?”

“That’s the i

rony. I don’t know. The last person I can trust or believe is me.”