“Yeah, the one that’s got her nose in the air. Here’s the word: Stay out of Jeff Davis Parish. Don’t mess with any of Tony Squid’s people. People should forget any rumors about Jimmy Nightingale.”
“Nightingale is a great guy?” Clete said.
“He slept wit’ some of those dead girls.”
“One of the Jeff Davis Eight?”
“I ain’t saying no more.”
“What if I spread it around that you’ve been shooting off your mouth? I might end up being your only friend, Pookie. Give that some thought.”
Pookie’s skin turned as gray as a dehydrated lizard’s, his eyes as tiny as seeds. “This ain’t right, no. I always he’ped you out, Purcel.”
“Then do it now. There’s at least one guy out there who needs to go off the board. Dave Robicheaux saw Penny’s body. The man’s feet were bolted to the floor. The guy who did him took his time, then pushed an electric drill through his eardrum into his brain.”
Somebody power-broke a tight rack, spilling two or three balls onto the floor. Pookie sat down on a felt-covered bench and picked up his bowl of chipped beef and started spooning it into his mouth as though it were wet confetti. He gagged and spat it back in the bowl. “I cain’t take this. I got to get out of town.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know nothing. That’s the point. Ain’t nobody gonna believe me, either. Nobody got my back.”
Clete went to the bar and bought two long-necks. He sat down next to Pookie and handed him one. “Guys like us are old-school. Drink up and quit worrying, Pook. We’re not that important to anybody.”
“T’ink so?”
“You bet,” Clete said, taking a swig.
Words he would regret.
* * *
ON FRIDAY MORNING, I began gathering my notes and writing my conclusions regarding the sexual assault on the person of Rowena Broussard. In many ways, the difficulty lay in the recalcitrant and illogical and contradictory statements and behavior of the accuser. She had not gone to a hospital; nor had she called the authorities or asked for a rape kit. Instead she had showered and destroyed any chance of the prosecution using the kind of forensic evidence that people have learned about from television shows. She had been impaired when the attack took place, if indeed it took place. A pillowcase had been pulled over her head, intensifying her pain and fear but leaving her descriptions muddled. The bruising on her body could have been caused by a fall outside the lounge where she had gotten drunk with the accused.
She said she had been raped by two men in Wichita, Kansas, but the prosecutor had dropped the charges for political reasons. It was possible she had transferred her rage at the injustice done her in Kansas to her current situation in New Iberia. It happens. The family physician had indicated that she may have been a neglected wife. “Hell hath no fury,” he had said.
Jimmy Nightingale was a conundrum as well. He had claimed he never touched Rowena except to pick her up when she fell in the parking lot. Then he had indicated he may have had a consensual experience with her, but he could remember no details. He had said they were both swacked out of their minds on hashish and alcohol, which I believed. Other than that, I knew little more than I did when the investigation began.
I’ve seen cops write off this kind of situation as he said/she said. That’s the cliché they use. When we see it in print or in an interdepartmental e-mail, it means the woman is about to get it in the neck.
Why?
The situation is not equal. The woman has to prove the existence of an act nobody other than the perpetrator was witness to. Perhaps a year will pass before the case goes to trial. In the meantime, she has to give depositions in front of strangers, accept lewd stares in a courthouse hallway, the hidden smirk in the face of a redneck cop, the muffled laughter among a group of males as she walks by. I once heard a Lafayette cop in the bullpen, right by the dispatcher’s cage, tell his colleagues about a man who held a woman down and rubbed his penis all over her body. He thought the story was hilarious.
In my summation, I said I believed the scratches on Rowena’s hip, the bruise inside her thigh, the bite mark on her shoulder, and the obvious emotional and psychological trauma visited upon her were consistent with her claim—namely, that while she was impaired, she was raped and probably orally sodomized by James Beaufort Nightingale. I also believed she’d showered and hadn’t told her husband about the assault immediately because she was ashamed and felt her drunken state had invited the attack.
What I couldn’t pu
t in my report was my dismay at Nightingale’s attitude. He was obsessed with guilt for air-bombing the Indians but cavalier about the possibility that he had raped Rowena Broussard in a blackout. Regardless, I did the best I could with the information I had, and I e-mailed it to Helen’s computer. Ten minutes later, she opened my door and leaned inside. “Way to rock, pappy.”
* * *
ON TUESDAY, JIMMY was formally charged. With an attorney by his side, he surrendered at the courthouse, and in under two hours, he was fingerprinted and released on twenty-five thousand dollars bail. That evening he gave an interview to three local television stations in his backyard. He was dressed in golf slacks and a polo shirt and seated by a reflecting pool blanketed with floating camellias. His skin was pink in the sunset, his bronze hair freshly barbered, his expression both calm and humble. Just as the interview began, he set aside a book he had been reading, one that looked like a Bible. His diction was perfect, his accent like the recorded voice of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren or Walker Percy. You felt he could recite from the telephone directory and turn it into the Sermon on the Mount.
“I’m disappointed and disturbed by the conduct of some of our officials,” he said. “I bear them no ill will, but I believe a small group of individuals have acted politically and done a disservice to their constituency. I promise to be as forthcoming as I possibly can. I love the state of Louisiana, and I love its people. I would never lie to them. Not now, not in the past, not in the future. I say this before the throne of God.”
He gazed at the scarlet reflection of the bayou in the moss-hung boughs of the live oaks, his face as chiseled and noble as Robert E. Lee’s at Appomattox.
No one could say Jimmy Nightingale didn’t have the touch.